Development of an Operating Robot System for Die and Mold Polishing

This paper proposes an operating robot system that assists polishing tasks in die and mold manufacturing. The proposed system consists of an industrial robot and a joystick. Theoperator manipulates the joystick and remotely moves a tool attached at the hand of the robot. A three-DOF motor-driven joystick was developed, and a force-reflecting bilateralcontroller was constructed in order to realize interactive manual operation. In addition to manual operation, the system can control the contact force of the tool automatically by the force feedback. The operator can use two control modes according to the task. The combination of the manual control and the automatic control enables effective and flexible polishing tasks of objects having complex shape. The developed system was applied to simple polishing tasks. Experimental results show that the tool can be manipulated remotely as if we were handling it directly. Moreover, the results suggest that the system increases the efficiency of polishing tasks remarkably