Grinding and Blending Steel Welds with an Industrial Robot, Servo Spindles and Force Control

Enjoying the videos and thinking about automation for your process? Talk with one of our automation specialists 👉 https://hubs.ly/Q046xFv-0 . In this video, we will be describing how to grind and blend steel welds using PushCorp Servo Spindles and Force Control Devices. This material removal application was performed on an industrial robot - Kawasaki ZX300. For more information about this tooling, make sure to check out the following link. https://hubs.ly/Q047jRg90 As for the video, the first step is choosing how to handle the parts. For this process we went with a "part in hand" solution. This means we used the industrial robot to pick up our part and bring it to the process equipment. This can be beneficial for heavy parts because the robot can pick up and drop off the part without any human interaction. Next, we had to choose the right material removal equipment to ensure that we could grind the steel weld flat and then blend the surface so it is nice and smooth. For this part, the welding was done manually so the weld bead was not very consistent. As a result, we used our SWS100-7.2 to machine the weld to a known height. This product has a belt driven slotting cutter that is connected to a powerful servo spindle. Then, we used passive force control to ensure the guide wheels maintained constant contact with the parent material. These components set the height of the machining process and also prevent the inserts from breaking. By setting the wheel's height, it guarantees that no material will be removed from the substrate. After the weld was processed to a consistent height we used a servo driven belt sander to grind the rest of the steel weld. The product we used was the SBS81, which has built in passive force control to ensure a constant force is applied. We used the 50 durometer contact wheel to finish leveling the weld. Then, we used the "slack in the belt" to do our final blending passes. A list of the equipment used can be found below. PushCorp Material Removal Tooling https://pushcorp.com/product/sws100-7... https://pushcorp.com/product/afd82/ https://pushcorp.com/product/sbs81-se... Abrasives https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b4007... Kawasaki Industrial Robots https://robotics.kawasaki.com/en1/pro... Video Chapters: 0:00 Overview - Grinding and Blending Steel Welds 0:34 Part Description - Carbon Steel Welded Cylinder 0:50 Process Equipment - Servo Spindles and Force Control Tooling Explained 2:30 Abrasives Explained - 3M 984F 3" x 148" 36+ Grit 3:30 Application Video - Leveling Weld with Servo Weld Shaver 4:20 Using a Servo Spindle to Grind and Level Steel Weld 5:09 Slack in the Belt process to Blend Weld If you have any questions, please make sure to leave them in the comments below and we will do our best to get you an answer. Thanks for watching!