RoboGrind: Intuitive and Interactive Surface Treatment with Industrial Robots
This addresses automation difficulties in industrial surface treatment, offering a practical solution for sectors like manufacturing, though it appears incremental as it integrates existing technologies into a new system.
The paper tackles the challenge of automating surface treatment tasks like grinding and polishing by presenting RoboGrind, an integrated system that combines 3D perception, voice-controlled AI assistance, and force-controlled robotic execution, evaluated in lab and real-world settings for wind turbine blade refabrication.
Surface treatment tasks such as grinding, sanding or polishing are a vital step of the value chain in many industries, but are notoriously challenging to automate. We present RoboGrind, an integrated system for the intuitive, interactive automation of surface treatment tasks with industrial robots. It combines a sophisticated 3D perception pipeline for surface scanning and automatic defect identification, an interactive voice-controlled wizard system for the AI-assisted bootstrapping and parameterization of robot programs, and an automatic planning and execution pipeline for force-controlled robotic surface treatment. RoboGrind is evaluated both under laboratory and real-world conditions in the context of refabricating fiberglass wind turbine blades.