Robotic Belt Grinding Method for the Surface of Whole Propeller Blade

Facing the problems of the interference easily occurred during the grinding of propeller blade surface, and the processing difficulties by CNC (computer numerical controlled) grinding machine, a robotic belt grinding system is designed adapting to the propeller blades. Firstly, mathematical model of robotic belt grinding is established combining the elastic deformation, the width and other factors of the belt and the contact wheel in actual grinding process. Then, the desired position and orientation of each joint of the robot can be obtained by the Descartes spatial coordinate (DSC) transformation according to the accessibility of the target point of the moving contact wheel. Furthermore, optimizations for the dexterous grinding workspace of belt and the grinding simulation are achieved through VERICUT. The grinding experiment is performed on Kawasaki RS20N, a robot of 6R configuration. The resulting deviation is less than ± 0.1mm comparing with the position of the blade surface feature point. It shows that the method can meet all actual processing requirements, and can improve the surface machining quality of the whole propeller.