Development of an Autonomous Sanding Robot with Structured-Light Technology
This addresses labor-intensive and inconsistent manual sanding in manufacturing, offering a general solution for various objects, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing automation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automating sanding tasks by developing an autonomous robot that uses structured-light scanning and motion planning to sand unknown objects without prior calibration or human intervention, validated by sanding wooden boxes.
Large demand for robotics and automation has been reflected in the sanding works, as current manual operations are labor-intensive, without consistent quality, and also subject to safety and health issues. While several machines have been developed to automate one or two steps in the sanding works, the autonomous capability of existing solutions is relatively low, and the human assistance or supervision is still heavily required in the calibration of target objects or the planning of robot motion and tasks. This paper presents the development of an autonomous sanding robot, which is able to perform the sanding works on an unknown object automatically, without any prior calibration or human intervention. The developed robot works as follows. First, the target object is scanned then modeled with the structured-light camera. Second, the robot motion is planned to cover all the surfaces of the object with an optimized transition sequence. Third, the robot is controlled to perform the sanding on the object under the desired impedance model. A prototype of the sanding robot is fabricated and its performance is validated in the task of sanding a batch of wooden boxes. With sufficient degrees of freedom (DOFs) and the module design for the end effector, the developed robot is able to provide a general solution to the autonomous sanding on many other different objects.