Maximiliano Falcone

Business Development Manager, PushCorp Inc.

Material Finishing Equipment: Choosing the Right Components to Win Business and Ensure Success

One of the items that has become very apparent over the last several years, is that when it comes to choosing the equipment that goes into a material removal cell, there are more options than ever before.  From manipulators to compliance devices to spindles to back stands, there are so many options that it can be overwhelming and the reality is that it is now easier than every to make the wrong decision.

This discussion will cover the different forms of compliance, spindles, back stands and finish stands and when to use them.  From the most basic of sanding applications to complex polishing applications, we will take a look at several successful user cases and discuss the parts and pieces that made these applications successful.  

By examining successful cases I hope to be able to equip the audience with the tools that will better equip them to go out and find their own success stories that we can showcase in the next material removal conference.

JD Haas

Application Specialist

Choosing the Right Abrasive Technology

With hundreds of abrasives available, how do you find the right abrasive to use in your robotic cell?  JD will identify the key technologies and key factors to consider in abrasive selection, sharing examples and knowledge gained from the hundreds of robot installations that 3M has supported.  Abrasive choice can dramatically improve (or worsen) performance and productivity in both existing and newly designed cells - this session will help you get the most out of your robot.  

Steven Somes

President
Force Robots

Combining Force Control and Measurement for Accurate and Adaptive Grinding

Achieving accurate blending and removal of excess material over complex, variable, and imprecisely located surfaces is a challenge, particular if there is a low allowance for reducing the dimension of the finished part. This is addressed by a system that combines accurately controlled contact force with measurement feedback from the tool. The result is precise and adaptive robotic grinding. The system uses an integrated robotic arm and part positioner from Force Robots equipped with an ATI tool changer to perform the work in stages. 3M Trizact 237AA belts are used for consistent material removal. The application presented is removing “pin blips” from nickel-alloy turbine blades. These positives on the airfoil surface are artifacts of a casting process that produces hollow cores in the airfoil with intricate cooling passageways. The challenge is to perfectly blend the blips with the adjacent airfoil surface without reducing the blade’s wall thickness. Since the blips are created by a manual insertion process, there is variability in their location and size.
 

The system works by the robot first loading a staged part into a fixture on the part positioner using a gripper. The robot then switches to a Dynafile II grinder equipped with a 60 grit belt. It’s job is coarse removal. A smooth final finish is required, but a fine grit belt would not have the required life if tasked with removing the roughly .100” height of the blip. The robot makes a series of contact measurements with the tip of the belt to locate the part in the fixture. The robot activates the grinder and takes down each blip to .005” to .010”. This is a height that is “safe” for the part and leaves some material for the next step. For this step, the robot switches to a grinder with a 3M Trizact 237AA A100 belt. At each nominal blip location, the robot makes two sweeping contact measurement passes over the surface with the belt turned off. The surface profile from the part’s CAD model is matched to the sweep measurements, and by differencing the two profiles the bounds of the remaining material and its height is determined. The robot then activates the grinder and begins working within the measured bounds. Since the measurement is performed in the frame of reference as the grinder, accurate calibration of the robot's grinding trajectory to the physical part and area of work is possible even with significant initial error, uncertainty, and variation. If this were an application with hard tooling, the robot could use in-process measurements of the tool path to determine material height and process termination. However with the belt grinder, compliance in the tool and robot, plus tool vibration, make it too difficult for the robot to discern the material height at the high level of accuracy required. The robot is capable of accurately and repeatably controlling its applied force, however, and the Trizact belts have consistent material removal rates. So using a predetermined relationship between passes and material removal, the robot calculates and executes the  number of passes at the required force needed to remove only the blip material. These steps are then repeated at each blip on the blade. This technique can be applied to other applications with variable features or imprecisely located surfaces. Weld bead grinding, for instance, is an application for this approach and an example will be shown.

Michel Beauchemin

Product owner, robot control applications
Robotiq

Automating finishing processes with standard industrial robots is nothing new, but thanks to collaborative robots and their simple plug-and-play sanding solutions, the barrier is now being lowered for SMEs to join in as well.

A cost-effective collaborative robot solution for sanding, polishing, or buffing that’s easy for any user to program is an opportunity small businesses have awaited for years. Now that this solution is available, where do they start? 

Finishing applications for collaborative robots require extensive design. It can be challenging to get all the hardware to work together in order to achieve great product quality. But by choosing the right robot, orbital tool, mounting bracket for the task at hand, and operating software to facilitate programming, SMEs can save days of integration time once the design is completed. 

In this keynote, participants will learn to map the manual process—whether it is a process-to-part finishing process, or a part-to-process task. Learn from real-life examples of  SMEs who overcame problems like recruiting for sanding operations, dealing with staff injuries, and having a collaborative robot available but not being able to achieve the desired results. 

Join us to see how they solved these issues with effective design choices.