An automated arc spray tooling system for rapid die-making of large-sized automobile body panels

Abstract

A creative robot wrist consisting of link mechanisms and a novel robot motion control method based on the cross-sectional vector contours of an STL-formatted model was proposed. By using the wrist and the control method, an industrial robot with five degrees of freedom for rapid tooling using metal arc spraying and electric brush plating techniques was developed. The wrist of the robot including a specially designed link mechanism can maintain the position of the spraying point on the surface of the master pattern whatever the orientation of the gun. Therefore, the kinematic nonlinear coupling between the position mechanism and orientation mechanism in a traditional robot can be avoided. The only input of the control system is the STL-formatted 3D CAD model of the pattern. Without the need of any manual programming, the metal arc spraying and brush plating (if necessary) processes can be performed automatically and efficiently after receiving the 3D CAD data of the pattern. Using this robot system in new car development and trial production, the cost and lead-time can be reduced substantially as compared with the conventional tool making method.