Description
Robots are the most univeral machines in terms of manufacturing. At the cost of being harder to configure / use / program. As the CAM tools such as Fusion360 are improving on a regular basis, the potential to use robots in the machining world is steadly growing.
The initially published postprocessor for KUKA (KRL - kuka robot language) is a first step to bring the power of fusion to a milling robot. Based on that post, I developed and tested a postprocessor for milling applications.
Since robots are intrinsicly prone to vibrations, all cutting path should be as smooth as possible. This is achived by bypassing the regular motion planning algorithm in the kuka contol. The results are very promising.
Key Learnings
- understand the basic concept on how robots work, what robots can do and why they can do it
- differenciate a 5 axis mill and a 6 axis robot with regards to their capabilities
- be able to generate 6 axis fusion360 toolpath that are ready for be executed on a Kuka KRC controller
- understand the downsides of using a robot arm for milling applications.