IEEE ISIE 2005, June 20-23, 2005, Dubrovnik, Croatia

A Mechatronic Design for Robotic Deburring

Dipartimento

di Ingegneria Meccanica, Universit` a di Brescia, Italy di Elettronica per lAutomazione, Universit` a di Brescia, Italy Email: {giacomo.ziliani,giovanni.legnani,antonio.visioli}@ing.unibs.it

Dipartimento

Giacomo Ziliani , Giovanni Legnani , Antonio Visioli

Abstract This paper deals with the implementation of a mechatronic methodology for the robotic deburring of planar workpieces with an unknown shape performed by an industrial manipulator. The approach is based on the use of a hybrid force/velocity control law and on a correlated suitable design of the adopted deburring tool. Experimental results, obtained with a two degrees-of-freedom SCARA industrial robot manipulator, show the effectiveness of the method.

I. I NTRODUCTION Robots that are able to autonomously adapt themselves to semi-unstructured tasks are nowadays a key issue in several industrial applications, such as grinding, deburring, chamfering and polishing, where the capability to cope with a workpiece of an unknown shape would signicantly reduce the task programming phase, especially when frequent changes in the production occur. Various methods to perform effectively a deburring task have been proposed in the literature. They are based for example on impedance control [1], on hybrid control with an internal position loop [2] (note that in this case the geometry of the workpiece is known), and on the so-called triangular control [3]. Soft-computing techniques can be also adopted (see e.g. [4], [5]). The idea to design the deburring tool in conjunction with the control algorithm has been pursued in [6], [7]. In particular, in [6], under the framework of impedance control, a roller bearing mounted on the force sensor is employed for the purpose of tracking. In this case however two force sensors are needed. Differently, in [7] an end-effector mounted jig and a proper design of the compliance of the manipulator are used to achieve accurate force guidance. An admittance control law is proposed but no results are given to prove the effectiveness of the method. In any case, when dealing with an unknown object, the robot has to perform a contour tracking task effectively, by imposing an appropriate normal force and an appropriate tangential velocity to the robot end-effector. In this context, the use of hybrid force/velocity control [8] is addressed in this paper. It will be shown that it can be effectively adopted for this task in conjunction with a suitable design of the milling tool. Indeed, by suitably adopting the measured torque along the vertical axis, it is possible to detect the contact angle in order to achieve an accurate tracking [9]. Further the presence of burrs can be detected and consequently the reference tangential velocity can be suitably modied to improve the quality of the deburring. II. E XPERIMENTAL SETUP Although the concepts discussed in this paper can be applied in general, in the following we refer to a

two-degrees-of freedom planar SCARA robot, as this is the one adopted in the experiments. The setup available in the Applied Mechanics Laboratory of the University of Brescia consists of an industrial manipulator with a standard SCARA architecture where the z axis has been blocked for our planar tasks. For a description of the dynamic model see [10]. Both links have the same length of 0.33 m. The two joints are actuated by DC motors (driven by conventional PWM ampliers) through Harmonic Drive speed reducers whose reduction rate is 1/100. Motor rotations are measured by means of two incremental encoders with 2000 pulses/rev. resolution. Velocity is estimated through numerical differentiation whose output is then processed by a low-pass second order Butterworth lter (100 Hz cut-off frequency and 1.0 damping ratio). An ATI 65/5 Force/Torque sensor capable of measuring forces and torques in a 65 N and 5 Nm range respectively with 0.05 N resolution is mounted at the manipulator wrist. The corresponding signals are processed at 7.8 kHz frequency by an ISA DSP based board and collected by the robot controller at 1 kHz after ltering. The PC-based controller is based on a QNX4 real time operating system and the control algorithms were written in C/C++ language. Acquisition and control were performed at a frequency of 1 kHz. III. BASIC CONTOUR TRACKING ALGORITHM A. Problem formulation With reference to Figure 1, frame (0) refers to the robot base, while task frame (T) has its origin on the robot endeffector, its n-axis is directed along the normal direction of the piece contour and its t-axis along its tangent; is the angle between n-axis and x-axis of frame (0). Let Q Q = [q1 , q2 ]T be the vector of the joint positions and Q, its rst and second time derivatives respectively. Since a suitable belt transmission keeps the end-effector with constant orientation with respect to the absolute frame, force measurements are directly available in frame (0). Let F(0) = [Fx , Fy ]T , F(T ) = [Ft , Fn ]T be the vectors of contact force in frame (0) and (T) respectively. They are related to each other by the equation F(0) = M0T ()F(T ) denoting with Mij the rotation matrix from frame j to frame i. Vector V(T ) = [Vt , Vn ]T representing the Cartesian velocity in frame (T) can be obtained from the relation V(T ) = MT 0 V(0) = MT 0 ()J (Q)Q where J (Q) is the robot Jacobian matrix. Note that, by assuming the absence of tangential friction force, the

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T ,Q

Vt ,d (t )

Vn
0

Vt
PID
kV,ff

MT 0J
u PID ,Vt
f1

(n) (T) (t) q (0) q

Vn ,d (t )

W1
Robot

 Q

Kv,fb
k F,ff

u P ,Vn

J T M 0T

W2
f 2

Fn , d (t )

PI
Fn

u PI , F

T ,Q

MT0
T ,Q

Fig. 2.

Basic hybrid force/velocity control scheme.

Fig. 1.

Sketch of a SCARA robot following a contour.

angle can be estimated on-line as: = atan2(Fy , Fx ) = arctan Fy Fx . (1)

However, this assumption is not valid when a deburring task is performed and therefore another estimation method has to be employed, as it will be described in Section 5. The aim of a contour tracking task is to control the normal force and the tangential velocity of the robot probe along the directions n and t of the task frame (T). B. Control law The following hybrid force/velocity control law has been considered (see the control scheme in Figure 2): = 1 2 = J T (Q)M0T (U(T ) + KR R) + f (2)

where R = [Vt,d , Fn,d ]T is the feedforward vector based on force and velocity references, KR = diag [kV,f f , kF,f f ] the corresponding diagonal matrix of = [f gains, f 1 ), f 2 )]T is an available estimate of 1 (q 1 (q the joint friction torques [11] and U(T ) = uP ID,V uP I,F + Kv,f b (Vn,d (t) Vn (t)) (3)

where uP ID,V is the tangential velocity PID output, uP I,F is the normal force PI output, Vn,d (t) = 0, Vn (t) is the velocity of the end-effector in the normal direction and Kv,f b is a proportional gain. Note that the use of a normal force derivative term has been avoided in (3) (indeed, only the proportional and the integral actions have been employed) as the derivation of such a signal is ill-conditioned [12], [13]. Conversely, the adoption of a normal force velocity feedback loop has been proven to be effective to compensate for the possible large force oscillations due to the kinetostatic behavior of the manipulator [14]. IV. ROBOTIC DEBURRING For the robotic deburring of unknown geometry workpieces two main problems have actually to be solved: 1) the estimation of the contour direction to allow the contour tracking of the workpiece without the loss of contact in presence of disturbances due to the cutting force; 2) the choice and the modulation of the correct contact force set-point to provide a satisfactory surface

quality and a complete burr removal. When a robot manipulator accomplishes a material removing task such as deburring, chamfering, and so on, the cutting force can introduce disturbances in the force control loop that can yield to the loss of contact and can cause an incorrect measure of the contact direction. Depending on the task, many parameters have to be considered such as the tool tangential velocity, the tool typology and sharpening, the direction of the angular velocity with respect to the path feed rate, the workpiece stiffness, the cutting depth, the height and thickness of burrs, and so on. For example, if the material is homogeneous, then the cutting force increases proportionally to the amount of material removed. If the manipulator is moving with constant speed along the contour, then the force will vary proportionally to the depth of cut. The cutting process therefore generates also a reaction force that is not directed tangentially to the surface. Indeed, the normal component of this contact force can give some problem to the force control introducing disturbances in the control loop and it may cause the manipulator to penetrate in the workpiece material or to detach depending on the verse of rotation of the mill with respect to the tool feed rate. In Figure 3 the forces acting on a workpiece during a milling process are reported. For simplicity it is assumed that only one tool tooth is in contact and that all the forces act in one single point. For each tool tooth in contact with the surface there is a cutting force Fc acting in the direction of the tangential speed and a normal force Fr acting in the radial direction. The radial force is usually assumed to be proportional to the cutting force, i.e. Fr = Fc tan( + ) where and are the friction angle and the tool front bevel angle respectively, which are very difcult to estimate. The cutting force on the workpiece Fc can be expressed as [15] bdvu Fc = where b is the tool wheel width, d is the depth of cut, v is the feed rate (i.e. the tangential velocity of the endeffector), u is the specic energy of the material and is the tool wheel speed. It appears that also in this case the involved parameters are very difcult to estimate. Fn and Ft are the components of the total force F on the normal and tangential direction respectively, dened with respect

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to the object contour. If the tool path feed rate direction is opposite to the tool cutting velocity (case a) the machining force acting on the workpiece has a component Ft directed as the tracking tangential velocity, while the normal component Fn is directed from the surface to the tool. The reaction forces generated on the tool (and sensed by the force sensor) have therefore opposite direction. Note that in this case the normal force tends to pull the tool inside the workpiece surface and eventually the tool and the robot may stall. Conversely, if the tool path feed rate sense is the same of the cutting velocity (case b) the normal component of the machining force is directed from the tool to the surface. The normal force generated on the tool (and sensed by the force sensor) has therefore the opposite verse and the tool tends to be pushed away from the surface. Further, for a correct deburring task the cut depth should vary proportionally to the burr height. The cut depth depends on the normal force (and on the value of + ) and so the normal force set-point should vary proportionally to the burr height. Unfortunately burrs size and thickness can be very different and discontinuous especially in casting workpieces.

and therefore it is almost impossible to have a sufciently accurate model-based estimation of . Thus, we propose a method that is based on the use of z -axis torque measure obtained from the six axes force/torque sensor and on the knowledge of the radius of the cutting mill, which can be easily a priori measured. Specically, with reference to Figure 4 we have that: Fx and Fy are the forces along the axis x and y respectively of the force sensor frame; Ftot is the total force; Fn and Ft are the normal and tangential forces respectively with respect to the workpiece surface; is the actual contact angle; is the apparent contact angle calculated as atan2(Fx , Fy ) (see (1)); is the angle between the actual and the measured contact directions; z is the z -axis measured torque; r is the radius of the cutting mill. In the hypothesis that the z -axis of the mill frame coincides with the sensor frame axis, the tangential force due to the machining operation is: z Ft = (4) r With trivial trigonometric relations the angle can easily be written as = arcsin where Ft Ftot . (5)

(a)

Ftot =

Fx 2 + Fy 2 =

Fn 2 + Ft 2

(6)

Thus, the actual contact angle can be simply calculated from the measured angle with a correction depending on the z -axis measured torque as follows: = (7)

or, substituting equation (5) in (7) it can be written as = atan2(Fx , Fy ) arcsin (b)
Fig. 3. Forces generated by the mill on the workpiece surface: a) the tool path feed rate and the tool rotation have an opposite direction; b) the tool path feed rate and the tool rotation have the same direction.

Ft Ftot

(8)

V. T HE MECHATRONIC DESIGN A. Contact direction estimation As already mentioned, the estimation of the angle between the n-axis and the x-axis of frame (0) is essential for the control algorithm. The knowledge of the cutting force, which can be derived by considering a model of the forces involved in a milling task, could be used to estimate the angle. However, in a deburring task many of the parameters may vary and may not be accurately known (for example the geometry of the casting burr)

However, if the vertical axis of the mill does not coincides with the vertical axis of the force sensor, then equation (5) cannot be used. This situation is depicted in Figure 5, where the center O of the force sensor frame is not coaxial with the center of the mill frame O. The position of the mill frame center with respect to the force sensor frame be denoted as (x, y ). In this case the measured torque z is not due only to the tangential force Ft but can be expressed as: z = z + F y x Fx y (9)

where z = Ft r is the machining torque and the term Fy x represents the torsional moment with respect to the point O generated by the force Ftot applied in O . Note that because of the terms Fy x and Fx y the force sensor measures a torque even if the tangential force

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Ft is null. The machining torque can be written therefore as: (10) z = z Fy x + Fx y and substituting equation (10) in (4)-(5) the value of Ft can be estimated as z Fy x + Fx y (11) r and the actual contact angle can still be obtained with (8). Ft =

By considering N samples, the following linear systems results: z1 = Fx1 y + Fy1 x . . . . . . zN = FxN y + FyN x which can be written also in matrix form as: z = F X where z1 . z = . . , zN Fx1 . . F = . Fxn x] .
T

Fy 1 . . . Fyn

and X = [y

Let F + be the pseudoinverse matrix of F . Then, x and y can be calculated, with the least square criterion, as: X = F + z (12)

Fig. 4. Forces acting on the cutting tool and measured by the force sensor without offset between the sensor and the mill.

Remark 1. It is worth stressing that the calibration procedure has to be performed just once on a workpiece whose shape guarantees a small condition number of F , in order to provide a good estimation of X , disregarding the kind of workpieces that have to be subsequently deburred. C. The deburring tool A major problem in the hybrid force/velocity control based deburring of workpieces of unknown geometry is the selection of the normal force set-point value. Actually, in order to measure the orientation of the surface, the contact force must be non null. Further, the amount of material removed by the mill obviously depends on the contact force. Thus, it appears that this is a crucial issue for the performance of the deburring task. In fact, if no information is given to detect the shape of the burrs or to decide wherever the surface must be worked or not, the mill will remove the same amount of material on all the contour, even when the surface is already nished. In other words, the size and the consistency of the burrs can be very different and the contact force should vary, in principle, to ensure a complete burrs removal and to prevent workpiece damages. For tender material as aluminum or plastic the problem is actually more signicant because the tool can penetrate inside the workpiece even for very low contact forces. Moreover, as shown in Figure 3(a), if the tool angular velocity has the same direction of the feed rate velocity, the reaction force Fn will tend to pull the mill inside the workpiece. This force is added to the normal force applied by the force control, but an increased normal force generates an higher cutting force and so an higher force Fn and so on. Eventually, the tool may get stuck in the workpiece. In order to effectively address these problems, a special deburring tool has been designed. The tool has two ball bearings mounted on the sides of the cutting cylindrical surface. The external diameter of the ball bearings is the same of that of the tool. The two ball bearings (or

Fig. 5. Forces acting on the cutting tool and measured by the force sensor with offset between the sensor and the mill.

B. Mill center calibration The position of the mill frame center O can be estimated with a simple least squares based calibration procedure. The calibration is based on the contour tracking of any planar object with the mill mounted on the end effector switched off i.e. rolling on the contour so that the machining force is null. During the tracking the values of Fx , Fy and Z are collected. Since the machining force is null, the measured torque is caused only by the offset of the z -axis of the mill with respect to the sensor frame, i.e. z = Fx y + FY x.

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one of them if the burrs are placed on the edges of the workpiece) have to be placed in contact with the surface where no burrs are present, while the cutting part has to be placed along the plane where the burrs lie (see Figure 6). In this way, the angular velocity of the tool has the same direction of the feed rate velocity, but the ball bearings avoid the penetration of the tool in the workpiece and also solve the problem of the choice of the set-point contact force value, which can be selected as a reasonable high value, in order to ensure that the thickest burrs are removed. Indeed, if no burrs are found on the tool path, the force applied to the workpiece will be only the ball bearings contact force and no material is removed from the workpiece. Further, the use of this kind of tool makes also possible the detection of the presence of burrs. Indeed, the measure of the z -axis torque increases when a burr is encountered (proportionally to the thickness of the burr) and this can be adopted to appropriately adapt the reference tangential velocity and therefore to improve the overall task time (see Section 6). Remark 2. It is worth noting that the devised methodology can be easily extended to chamfering by using a conical cutter instead of a cylindrical one.

Fig. 6. The deburring tool for the removal of central and edging burrs.

VI. E XPERIMENTAL RESULTS The tool chosen for the deburring task is a high speed 20000 rpm pneumatic mill. Irregularities in the rotation of the tool are transmitted to the force sensor introducing high frequency noise in the force control loop. To face this problem a low pass lter with a cut-off frequency of 100 Hz has been introduced in the force/torque acquisition. As a rst experiment, in order to verify the effectiveness of the contact angle estimation method (see subsection 5-A), a deburring task has been performed on a articial burr created with an iron sheet xed between two straight aluminum pieces. The iron sheet was 3 mm high and 1 mm thick. The modied deburring tool has been used. The reference normal force has been xed at 30 N, while the reference tangential velocity has been xed at 5 mm/s. In Figure 7 the articial burr is shown after the deburring task executed without the compensation of the contact angle. The burr has not been removed completely and the tool has contoured the burr because of the wrong contact angle estimation. Actually, the tracking velocity increases during the task because the normal force is not controlled in the actual normal direction and partially is directed in the unconstrained direction. For the same reason the actual normal force decreases. Thus, it appears

that the increased tracking velocity and the reduced actual contact angle yield to a uncomplete burr removal. Note that the normal force and the tangential velocity errors are not detected by the controller because of the wrong contact angle estimation. In Figure 8 the articial burr is shown after the deburring task has been executed with the compensation of the contact angle presented in subsection 5-A. It appears that in this case the burr has been completely removed. To give a better insight in the results, the measured contact angle and the z-axis torque without and with the compensation procedure are reported for comparison in Figure 9 and 10. It can be noted that the angle remains almost constant with the use of the compensation technique while without compensation a larger deviation from the actual value is observed (about 75 deg). Note that although the tangential velocity and the normal force set-points and the burr height are the same in both cases, the path as been executed faster without the angle compensation. As a second experiment, the system has been tested on a real aluminum die casting workpiece. In this case, the z axis torque is used to detect the presence of the burrs and to consequently reduce the reference tangential velocity (see subsection 5-C). Thus, the reference tangential velocity is xed at 5 mm/s but if the z -axis torque value exceed a xed threshold of 0.05 Nm, the reference velocity is reduced to 0.8 mm/s. Then, when the burr is completely removed and the measured torque decreases, the set point returns to the previous value. The original workpiece is shown in Figure 11. Note that the burrs lay in different positions along the die closure plane and on the edging of the surface as indicated by the arrows. The height of some burrs exceeded 15 mm and the thickness was about 1 mm. A picture of the workpiece after the robotic deburring is shown in Figures 12-13, demonstrating the high performances achieved by the system while the milling tool during the deburring task is reported in Figure 14. Videos of the experiments are available at http://robotics.ing.unibs.it/deburring/deburring.html.

Fig. 7. The articial burr after the attempt of removal without the contact angle compensation.

Fig. 8. The articial burr after the removal with the contact angle compensation.

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Fig. 14.

The new milling tool during the deburring task.

VII. C ONCLUSIONS In this paper we have presented a mechatronic methodology for the robotic deburring of workpieces of unknown shape. The combined design of the milling tool and of a hybrid force/velocity controller, which is based on measurements provided by a force/torque sensor, allows to obtain high performances as demonstrated by the obtained results. Due also to its simplicity, the overall methodology appears suitable to be implemented in industrial settings. R EFERENCES
[1] H. Kazerooni, Automated robotic deburring using impedance control, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Vol. 8, pp. 21-25, 1988. [2] G. Duelen, H. Munch, D. Surdilovic, J. Timm, Automated force control schemes for robotic deburring: development and experimental evaluation, Proc. Int. Conf. on Industrial Electronics, Control, Instrumentation, and Automation San Diego (CA), pp. 912-917. [3] G. Ferretti, G. Magnani, P. Rocco, Triangular force/position control with application to robotic deburring, Machine Intelligence and Robotic Control, Vol. 2, pp. 83-91, 2000. [4] F.-Y. Hsu, L.-C. Fu, Intelligent robot deburring using adaptive fuzzy hybrid position/force control, IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 325-335, 2000. [5] K. Kiguchi, T. Fukuda, Position/force control of robot manipulators for geometrically unknown objects using fuzzy neural networks, IEEE Trans. on Ind. Elec., Vol. 47, pp. 641-649, 2000. [6] H. Kazerooni, G. M. Her, Robotic deburring of two dimensional parts with unknown geometry, Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. on Intelligent Control, Arlington (VA), pp. 459-464, 1988. [7] J. M. Schimmels, The use of compliance and constraint for improved robotic material removal processes, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, San Diego (CA), pp. 2627-2632, 1994. [8] M. H. Raibert, J. J. Craig, Hybrid Position/Force Control of Manipulators, ASME Journal of Dyn. Syst., Meas., and Control, Vol. 102, pp. 126-133, 1981. [9] M. Jinno T. Yoshimi, A. Abe, Force controlled grinding robot system for unstructured task,Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Raleigh, (NC), pp. 1117-1124, 1992. [10] A. Visioli, G. Legnani, On the trajectory tracking control of industrial SCARA robot manipulators, IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 224-232, 2002. [11] Jatta F., Adamini R., Visioli A., Legnani G., Hybrid force/velocity robot contour tracking: an experimental analysis of friction compensation strategies, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Washington DC, pp. 1723-1728, 2002. [12] J. J. Craig, Introduction to Robotics: Mechanics and Control, 2nd edition, Addison-Wesley, New York, 1989. [13] O. Khatib, A unied approach for motion and force contol of robot manipulators: the operational space formulation, IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 43-53, 1987. [14] Jatta F., Legnani G., Visioli A., Hybrid force/velocity control of industrial manipulators with elastic transmissions, Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intell. Rob. and Syst., Las Vegas, pp. 3276-3281, 2003. [15] J. D. Radford, Production Engineering Technology, McMillan Press, London (UK), 1980.

Fig. 9. The contact angle esteem without (top) and with (bottom) the compensation during the deburring of an articial burr.

Fig. 10. The z -axis torque during the deburring of the articial burr without (top) and with (bottom) the compensation.

Fig. 11. An aluminum die casting workpiece before the deburring task.

Fig. 12. The aluminum die workpiece casting after the deburring task.

Fig. 13. Zoom of the aluminum die casting workpiece after the deburring.

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