Automated industrial robot arm for three-dimensional measurement and reverse engineering

Abstract

The general purpose Industrial robots, such as the ABB IRB1410 have been used for pick and place welding, painting, assembly and drilling operations etc. The applications of robots in the dimensional inspection is uncommon. Though reverse engineering and 3D part generation can be done though existent laser scanner and Articulated Arm CMMs seems to very expensive and human-centric. This necessitates a low cost, non-contact, automated measurement system. An idea is mooted for using an industrial robot as a coordinate measuring machine (CMM), just by interfacing its coordinates to a computer as oppose to its routine of positioning its end effector to already taught points. In this work, an industrial robot arm, alongside a LASER triangulation sensor is used to probe three-dimensional work objects automatically within the area and create a point cloud data for the same. The measurement of objects is determined using coordinates of robot’s end effectors and fitting respective mathematical entities to it. The applications of such a system are endless; it could be used for inspection and reverse engineering. The point cloud is processed and filtered to give the best fit surface which matches the actual workpiece. The surface generated was compared with a CMM data, and it showed a very small deviation of 2 μm, thus indicating the efficiency of the system. © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.