Development of grinding and polishing technology for stainless steel with a robot manipulator

In traditional industries, manual grinding and polishing technologies are still used predominantly. However, these procedures have the following limitations: excessive processing time, labor consumption, and product quality not guaranteed. To address the aforementioned limitations, this study utilizes the good adaptability of a robotic arm to develop a tool-holding grinding and polishing system with force control mechanisms. Specifically, off-the-shelf handheld grinder is selected and attached to the robotic arm by considering the size, weight, and processing cost of the stainless steel parts. In addition, for contact machining, the robotic arm is equipped with a force/torque sensor to ensure that the system is active compliant. According to the experimental results, the developed system can reduce the surface roughness of 304 stainless steel to 0.47 µm for flat surface and 0.76 µm for circular surface. Moreover, the processing trajectory is programmed in the CAD/CAM software simulation environment, which can lead to good results in collision detection and arm posture establishment.