Fundamental Research On Robotic Prototype Manufacture

In the recent 20 years, the market environment of manufacturing industry has greatly changed, and the requests of customers are made for products' diversification and characterization. Thereby manufacturing industry keep seeking new production mode and technique strategy which rapidly response to the changeable market.The DPST (Direct Prototype Spray Tooling)which is developed by Huazhong University of Science & Technology integrates Plasma Spray Metal Tooling with the robotic technology; it can manufacture injection mold and metal sheet punching mold, which have the stainless steel or Nickel-Chrome-Iron alloy shell with good abilities of corrosion-proof and wear resisting.In DPST, the previously method of fabricating ceramic prototype is directly milling ceramic blank by robot. The ceramic is typical brittle material, which is hard to be fabricated. And only when wetness it can be fabricated, after completely dried it can hardly be fabricated. So the main limitations of this method are the long period of actually producing the ceramic prototype, and the limited fabricating size scale of the ceramic prototype.Clay has good plasticity, it can be easily shaped rapidly, and the maximum scrape depth can increase up to 100mm. When fabricating the clay, the maching parameter and robot scanning speed can be setted at a higher level than that of the ceramic. The maching parameter and the scanning speed of robot can also be set higher than fabricating the solid ceramic blank. The utilization of it in place of previously method can save significant fabrication effort, especially when the geometry of the product is big.In this paper, a digital prototype manufacture system has been built on a 6-axis robot. The principle of robotic path planning of prototype forming is presented,and robotic finish milling ceramics prototype path planning is researched further.Finally, the paper issues an example of automobile panel mold adopted indirect robot path system, the required soft prototype with good accuracy and surface quality has been fabricated. The above result verifies that the system is feasible and stable.