Teachingless spray-painting of sculptured surface by an industrial robot

Abstract

The study deals with the automatic spray-painting by a 6-DOF industrial robot equipped with an air spray gun. Since the conventional robot control command generation for the spray-painting is manually performed by skilled workers using a teaching-playback function of a robot controller, it is a time consuming and experience required process. The study aims at generating the robot control commands without any special knowledge on spray-painting, in the case of bumpers of a car as an example of sculptured surfaces. The system can automatically generate a spraying path for the air spray gun on the basis of CAD date of the workpiece, and change the spraying path into robot control commands. From experimental results, the system was found to be effective in painting bumpers of a car with uniform paint thickness.