Developing Force Control Scenarios on ABB IRB 4600 with Camera Capture of Dynamic Motions

Finishing processes are among the earliest applications of industrial robots. Therefore, machining with the help of robot technology is widely used in industries today. The potential of increasing the efficiency and developing new complex tasks is still existing. This thesis investigate the scenarios by comparing the position of the end effector to a highly precise camera system. Thus, the physical behavior of the robot is always known compared to robot measurements itself. The research is focused on two cases, which is the motion in free space and the motions while in contact with an object using Force Control (FC). Motions in free space are examined because it is desired to see the behavior of the end effector while no physical forces is applied. Afterwards we can compare if there exists similarities with the motions for a FC scenario. The FC scenario consist of a path while in contact with a leveled and planar metal object. For the FC implementation, it was applied 1 to 50 Newton force towards a leveled object. The robot performed with a displacement for the end effector on the robot side up to 240 µm. The camera system measured the physical motion and revealed that each run between 1 and 50 Newton follows the same path, without displacement. In the FC procedure, it was found through experimentation oscillations of 0.14 Hz along the path. These oscillations are existing for every FC scenario in this thesis. The oscillations should be compensated by a controller, which remains as future work. A suggestion is presented in the thesis which is about changing the velocity along the FC procedure from a constant c to a variable h(x) as step based or as a polynomial. When a controller is developed, the research is one step closer for developing a quality strong product for a machining process by an industrial robot