Design methods for intelligent robotic deburring cells

Cast iron parts deburring is a complicate and always more demanding task: it requires to realize an accurate 3D surface contouring, to be performed with an adequate tool stiffness and cutting power. At present time, cast iron parts production is characterized by small size lots of components which often have very different geometries. Moreover, it is easy to find that every single part of the same lot is quite different from the others, due to different burrs, varying in size and geometrical shape. Then cast iron parts deburring is a hard task which requires extreme flexibility. For this reason industrial robots seem to be the ideal solution; unfortunately the long time needed for programming the robot and the manufacturing cycle, together with the parts variability and components range reduces heavily the overall manufacturing efficiency and profitability. For this reason, novel intelligent manufacturing methods must be realized and implemented. In the present paper it will be presented the integrated design and development of a new generation of cast iron parts robotic intelligent deburring and the engineering design methods adopted to achieve such results. The deburring of cast iron parts is performed by anthropomorphous robots with the integrated aid of vision systems, custom designed adaptive compliance tools and virtual prototypes of the cell itself, where it is possible to simulate all the different manufacturing tasks and automatically generate the code for the robotic cell numeric control. Using synergically all these tools and technologies it has been finally possible to overcome all the limits and problem of the state of the art. In fact, through the creation of a functional virtual prototype of the cell architecture, linked to different design and simulation environments, all the different operating scenarios can be simulated and all the information and data needed to solve the specific problems obtained. Exploiting synergically the performances of the vision system and the digital prototype it is possible to let the robot to interpret the operating scenario and to adopt proper intelligent behaviours, while, the realization of custom designed adaptive tools improves the cell overall performances. Furthermore, a design method for iron cast robotic deburring will be described.