President’s Message/Message du Président 16 Spring / Printemps 2018 POLISHING ROBOT The advent of modern polishing tech- niques emerged in the early 1900s. Advances in automation technology have allowed equipment builders to develop automated equipment to pro- cess more complex shape parts. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, some auto- mated polishing applications were implemented, but only the simple shape applications could be accom- plished. More complex shaped parts required many media process- ing heads, each head working on a specific part area. The development of robotic technol- ogy has further improved automation of finishing applications for both simple and complex shape parts. The robot with its six axes of motion can maneuver complex shaped parts, and with the proper head and tooling design can successfully polish six sides of most part surfaces. The industrial robot can replicate the motions a human would make during the manual finishing process. Robots, while lacking the human senses of sight and touch, do possess the abil- ity to replay their programmed path with a great deal of repeatability. Through the implementation of force control a constant polishing pressure can be applied to the work piece. Last but not least, robots produce consistent, high-quality finishing with greater throughput while reducing the exposure of workers to the con- taminants, noise and monotony of grinding, polishing, buffing and sand- ing processes. WELDING ROBOT The robot is for automatic arc weld- ing or spot welding applications. The robot arm moves the welding gun over the surface to be welded while maintaining a proper distance, speed, and orientation relative to the surface. The smooth and accur- ate motion of the welding equipment achieves consistently high quality welds. Fea- turing lightweight aluminum alloys, the arm integrates welding wire feed cabling and mounting holes for the welding gun in proximity of the welding location. This allows effect- ive welding process control. The controller includes easy-to-use arc welding and spot welding functions. The system has high accuracy pos- itioning and path tracking, arm dex- terity for complex welding process- es, and is easy to program. Possible usage in other application areas are dispensing and cutting. SCARA ROBOT FOR ASSEMBLY MANUFACTURING The SCARA robot consists of base, first axis joint, link arm, second axis joint, link arm, third axis and fourth axis joints. The arm is for small- footprint, light-payload applications where high precision, high speed, and high performance are required. It has a modular design including: sin- gle-joint modules, compliant joints and has high payload/weight ratio. The robot is configured out of four modules: a large joint module, a medium size module, and a two- joint wrist module. An “extended” SCARA robot can be configured with five joints by adding one more joint to the wrist to allow tilting of the end-effector that does not exist in the standard SCARA robot. Other configurations are possible as well. The modular joints are controlled by an embedded fully digital servo drive. By connecting several mod- ules together one obtains a robot. The robot can be used for assembly manufacturing, and can work side- by-side with a human. The robot is light weight, and has high speed, high accuracy, small footprint, inte- grated force/torque sensor interface for force and impedance control and integrated vision sensor interface for visual servoing. HIGH PAYLOAD ROBOT Applications of the high payload robot are in machine tending, palletising, packaging, part transferring, pick and Welding Robot Robots SCARA Robot High Payload Robot place, grinding, deburring, and pol- ishing. The arm has large payload, large working space, high speed, high accuracy, and integrated force/torque sensor interface for force and imped- ance control, integrated vision sensor interface for visual servoing. The robot achieves high strength and agility with high payloads without sacrificing speed and accuracy. It consists of base, turret, shoulder tilt, upper link, elbow tilt, lower link, wrist, first roll, wrist pitch and wrist second roll, and gripper. Turret and shoulder have the same internal layout, motor, input gear and reducer. The rotation of elbow joint is realized through a servomotor with a fixedly attached input gear to drive a reducer directly. The wrist assembly consists of three joints: wrist-first roll, pitch, and secondroll.Threeidenticalmotorsare used for the three joints of the wrist assembly. They are mounted on the back of the upper link to conveniently maintain and ease the balancing of the robotic system. However, it is a challenge for the mechanical design to transmit the motion and torque of the three motors to the wrist. A counterbalancing system is used to compensate the load moments of each axle such that the axle drive is not overloaded statically, thus it can provide the maximum moment available for the acceleration of the axle. The balancing device is arrangedtocounteractagravitational force upon relative movement of the robot arms. ■ ate motion of the welding equipment achieves consistently high quality welds. Fea- turing lightweight aluminum alloys, the arm integrates welding wire The robot is configured out of four modules: a large joint module Polishing Robot