Investigation on the machining performance of a hole-making 6R serial robot

In this work, we investigate on the machining performance of a hole-making 6R serial robot with small rated load and try to optimize the machining quality by adjusting the machining pose. Five different poses of the end-effector are tested, and the stiffness of the robot in each direction is obtained through measuring the displacement of the robot end under a given applied external force. It is found that the greater the stiffness is, the higher quality of the machined hole is, suggesting that the pose of the robot should be carefully chosen for drilling to guarantee that the end-effector is at the highest stiffness state.