3D robot sander for artistically designed furniture

This chapter introduces a robotic sanding system for attractively designed furniture with free-formed surfaces. The system is developed using an industrial robot with an open-architecture controller. The system has two novel features. One is that the surface-following controller developed for robotic sanding allows the robot to simultaneously realize a delicate polishing force control and smooth position/orientation control. The other is that a conventional and complicated teaching task is not required at all. The proposed robot sander directly handles CL data generated from 3D CAD/CAM, so that such a teaching process can be omitted. It is demonstrated that the proposed system can successfully sand the curved surface of attractive furniture with an extremely good quality.