Design and Analysis of the Spray-Painting Robot for tall statues and monuments

The painting on tall structures, statues, monuments and buildings is dangerous task for humans. Robotics finds its applications in operations, which are repetitive, hazardous, and dangerous. The aim of the present work is to design a manipulator for spray painting on surfaces of tall monuments, statues and structures. The robot can be installed on a crane platform for lifting and operated from the ground. A lightweight and compact design is desired that can be easily accommodated within the space of the crane. A Revolute-Revolute-Revolute-Prismatic (RRRP) type Robotic arm is developed and analysed for this application. By establishing the rigid body tree model in Robotics System Toolbox, the numerical model of direct and inverse kinematics using Homogenous Matrix Transformation is prepared in MATLAB. Using the spray patch method and offline programming method, the spray model is prepared in Solid woks to obtain trajectory waypoints. A B-spline path is generated through these waypoints. At each waypoint, joint displacement variables are calculated using an inverse kinematic model. An air-less spray gun is selected and attached with a robot. Controlled motion algorithm for spray painting operation on a circular surface were obtained with simulation results. A smooth trajectory for performing spray painting is obtained.

Workspace Analysis of Spray Painting Robot with Two Working Modes for Large Ship Blocks in Ship Manufacturing

Spray painting is crucial in the process of shipbuilding and runs through the whole process of shipbuilding. In order to obtain the good coating quality during the painting process, gantry type painting robot could be used because of its resource-saving and environment-friendly characteristics. Based on the structural parameters of the spray painting manipulator with 3DOF (Degree of freedom) gantry, the kinematic model of the painting robot system can be established. From the perspective of the two commonly working modes, namely 3P3R robot structure and the 3P6R redundant robot structure, their spraying workspace are analyzed. The result shows that the workspace volume of the 3P6R robot is much larger than that of the 3P3R robot. However, the inverse kinematics solution of 3P3R robot has analytical solution, which makes the control accurate and easy to use, and through the simulation, we can give the theoretical basis for the engineering.

Design of automatic spray monitoring and tele-operation system based on digital twin technology

To solve the problems of low degree of automation, difficulty in quality control and poor working environment during the process of spray-painting rotational parts, this paper designs an automatic spray monitoring and tele-operation system based on digital twin technology, which can realize real-time monitoring and tele-operation fault treatment during the spraying process to achieve the goal of “man-machine isolation”. First, an automatic production line for spraying operations is designed in which the spraying equipment can be remotely controlled. Then, multiple sensors are used to collect the environmental and equipment conditions. After that, multisource heterogeneous data are pretreated to construct a unified data template and interfaces. On this basis, a three-dimensional model of the environment and equipment is established. According to the fusion and mapping between sensor data and the geometric model, an augmented reality twin model of spray painting is obtained. Additionally, the relevant support database and knowledge base are established; a fault diagnosis method based on knowledge is proposed to provide support for fault treatment. Finally, an automatic spraying monitoring and tele-operation software platform is developed that can run under monitoring or tele-operation mode, and the related functions are tested and verified. The test results show that the system is more efficient than manual spraying method, and the coating surfaces is flatter, effectively reducing the probability of sagging, orange peel, missing spray and other problems. This research provides a reference for the design and construction of automatic spraying production lines.

Point cloud modeling and slicing algorithm for trajectory planning of spray painting robot

To improve the uniformity of coating thickness and spraying efficiency, new point cloud modeling and slicing algorithm are proposed to deal with free-form surfaces for the spray painting robot in this paper. In the process of point cloud modeling, the edge preservation algorithm is firstly presented to avoid damaging the edge characteristic of the point cloud model. For the spraying gun, the coating deposition model on the free-form surface is determined on the basis of the elliptic double $\beta $ distribution model. Then, the grid projection algorithm is proposed to obtain grid points between adjacent slices on the free-form surface. Based on this, the analytical solution for calculating the coating thickness at each grid point is obtained. The cross-section contour points are obtained by intercepting the point cloud model with several parallel slices, which is important for the trajectory planning of the spray painting robot. Finally, the uniformity of coating thickness is optimized in terms of the moving speed of the spraying gun and the slice thickness. The simulation and numerical experiment results show that the uniformity of coating thickness and spraying efficiency are improved using the proposed point cloud modeling and slicing algorithm.

Multi-objective optimal design of a novel 6-DOF spray-painting robot

This paper deals with the multi-objective optimal design of a novel 6-degree of freedom (DOF) hybrid spray-painting robot. Its kinematic model is obtained by dividing it into serial and parallel parts. The dynamic equation is formulated by virtual work principle. A performance index for evaluating the compactness of robot is presented. Taking compactness, motion/force transmissibility, and energy consumption as performance indices, the optimal geometric parameters of the robot are selected in the Pareto-optimal set by constructing a comprehensive performance index. This paper is very useful for the development of the spray-painting robot.

Design, Construction and Testing of a Microcontroller based Robotic Arm for Spray Painting

Robots can be used in painting operations like many other automated jobs. It can also perform welding, drilling, grinding, carrying operation, and various industrial process with the integration of proper tools with its arm. Robots are used widely in industrially developed countries to perform many operations of their industrial processes. Though the application of robots is limited in our country, the implementation has been initiated with the recent trend of moving forward to the automated industry.