With the recent advancement on robotics and CAD/CAM technologies, an articulated robot has been applied as a multi-axis CNC machine for producing complex/large prototypes. However, the single-robot machining technology can only offer limited machining capability due to its limited degrees of freedom, restricted reach and inherent singular points. To overcome the problems, a dual-robot workcell has been developed. / The development of the dual-robot workcell is presented in this thesis. It consists of four main parts, namely: kinematic modelling and postprocessor development; dual-robot programme generation and its control; robot calibration; and implementation of the system. / Kinematic models were constructed to establish the analytical description for both robots in the workcell, and therefore an accurate control of positions and orientations of each robot could be achieved in the machining process. In addition, a postprocessor was successfully developed for the dual-robot workcell to achieve the integration of three major types of five-axis machining configurations. These are the tool/workpiece-tilting type, the workpiece-tilting type and the tool-tilting type. / A robot path generation module was developed to automatically generate the programmes required for both robots to machine components. Furthermore, a PC-based distributed control architecture for the dual-robot workcell was implemented to control the robots to execute concurrent motions for machining operations. The robot controllers communicated successfully with each other via the architecture / A camera-aided method was proposed for calibrating the positioning accuracy of the dual-robot workcell. The method was implemented and provided sufficiently good results for prototyping tasks, with the calibrated accuracy approaching to the robot's repeatability. / Finally, several experiments were conducted to verify the current prototyping capability of the dual-robot workcell. From the results of prototyping spherical and sculptured surfaces, the dual-robot machining shows greater advantages over single-robot machining in terms of machining productivity and quality. / The result shows that the proposed scheme is an effective approach to complement existing CNC and single-robot machining techniques for achieving rapid and flexible prototyping. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2004.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/267641 |
| Creators | Huang, Hsuan-Kuan. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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