Design of a mixed robotic machining system and its application in support removal from metal additive manufactured thin-wall parts

Robotic machining could provide a solution for removing supports from metal additive manufactured workpieces, replacing labor-intensive work. However, the robot’s intrinsic weaknesses of low positioning accuracy and structural rigidity primarily restrict its applications. Improving the accuracy of robotic machining remains an unresolved issue. A mixed solution is proposed, in which a portable CNC machine with the capability of visual feature recognition is equipped with a universal industrial robot. The robot implements positioning motions in a large space, while the portable CNC fulfills accurate machining motions on a local feature of the workpiece. A sizeable weight of the portable CNC exerts a moderate load on the industrial robot’s joints, increasing joint stiffness. The mixed machining system exhibits high accuracy and stiffness when milling a steel/titanium alloy workpiece, achieving tolerances up to ±0.04 mm on a 60×80 mm U-shaped path without exciting any structural vibration modes. When the dimension of the workpiece exceeds the machining range of the portable CNC, a combined algorithm of coarse-fine registration based visual identification and robot error compensation is designed to align the spatial coordinates of the machining motion with that of the positioning motion, thereby extending the machining range with high accuracy. Through the proposed mixed robot machining method, experiments of doubling the machining range have been done to verify that the mixed machining robotic system is able to slot a 550 mm-long path with accuracy of ±0.1 mm. Furthermore, the mixed robotic machining system is applied to recognize and remove multiple supports of lattices, grids and ribs from a titanium-alloy additive manufactured thin-wall workpiece with high accuracy and high efficiency.