Robotic sanding system for new designed furniture with free-formed surface

In this paper, a sanding system based on an industrial robot with a surface following controller is proposed for the sanding process of wooden materials constructing furniture. Handy air-driven tools can be easily attached to the tip of the robot arm via a compact force sensor. The robotic sanding system is called the 3D robot sander. The robot sander has two novel features. One is that the polishing force acting between the tool and wooden workpiece is delicately controlled to track a desired value, e.g., 2 kgf. The polishing force is defined as the resultant force of the contact force and kinetic friction force. The other is that no complicated teaching operation is required to obtain a desired trajectory of the tool. Cutter location (CL) data, which are tool paths generated by a CAD/CAM system, are directly used for the basic trajectory of the handy tool attached to the robot arm. The robot sander can be applied to the sanding task of free-formed curved surface with which conventional sanding machines have not been able to cope. The effectiveness and promise are shown and discussed through a few experiments.