Industrial Robots in Mechanical Machining: Perspectives and Limitations

Abstract

Recently, the need to produce from soft materials or components in extra-large sizes has appeared, requiring special solutions that are affordable using industrial robots. Industrial robots are suitable for such tasks due to their flexibility, accuracy, and consistency in machining operations. However, robot implementation faces some limitations, such as a huge variety of materials and tools, low adaptability to environmental changes, flexibility issues, a complicated tool path preparation process, and challenges in quality control. Industrial robotics applications include cutting, milling, drilling, and grinding procedures on various materials, including metal, plastics, and wood. Advanced robotics technologies involve the latest advances in robotics, including integrating sophisticated control systems, sensors, data fusion techniques, and machine learning algorithms. These innovations enable robots to adapt better and interact with their environment, ultimately increasing their accuracy. The main focus of this study is to cover the most common industrial robotic machining processes and to identify how specific advanced technologies can improve their performance. In most of the studied literature, the primary research objective across all operations is to enhance the stiffness of the robotic arm’s structure. Some publications propose approaches for planning the robot’s posture or tool orientation. In contrast, others focus on optimizing machining parameters through the utilization of advanced control and computation, including machine learning methods with the integration of collected sensor data.

Toward Optimal Robot Machining Considering the Workpiece Surface Geometry in a Task-Oriented Approach

“…In addition to the above-mentioned industrial robot applications, there are also others, such as more complex robot machining [7] or milling [8], deburring [9], surface finishing [10], grinding [11], polishing [12,13], hammer-peening [14,15], etc. An excellent review of the state-of-the-art and the perspectives on the use of industrial robots in mechanical machining processes is presented in [16]. In some processes, the subtracting manufacturing technology requires a significant machining force in the tool feed direction for material removal, and in some, the machining force is required in the direction only toward the workpiece surface.…”

“…Such planning problems have been interesting research topics for many years, and their application in practice still attracts attention in the research community. In general, path/trajectory planning is important for industrial robot applications since there is a strong interest in reducing the time interval of production cycles to provide optimal robot energy performance and task feasibility under the robot's joint physical limits [16,22]. The researchers optimized the location of the robot to generate maximum task-space velocity with minimum joint velocities [23].…”

Design and development of a quadruped home surveillance robot

“…The application-specific robots are industrial robots and service robots. Industrial robots are robots that are used for manufacturing and the logistics of materials in the manufacturing process [3]. Service robots are defined by the International Organization for Standards as robots for personal or professional use that perform useful tasks in different environments [4].…”