RAMLAB (Rotterdam additive manufacturing lab) is a researchcenter in the port of Rotterdam. It’s main focus is to develop WAAM (Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing) for the industry. WAAM is proces where weld-beads are ‘stacked’ on top of each other to form a 3d object. RAMLAB uses a 6 axis Valk Welding Robot to perform this process. In 2018 they are the first in the world to print a propellor for a tuck-boat.
After printing the propellor it has to be finished with a grinder as can be seen in the video above. This process takes a week and is very labor intensive. Therefor automating this process will have a lot of benefits. RAMLAB gave the taks to group of students of SMR to see if this is possible. The goal is to scan and automatically finish 3D printed products.
The group used ROS-industrial (robot operating system) in combination with an UR10 (universal robot). In ROS-industrial there is package called scan and plan to perform this task. The software package was configured for ABB robots and is reconfigured by the project group to work with an UR10. They used a Microsoft XBOX Kinect camera to perform the scanning and a simple angle grinder to finish the product.
For this product the group also made use of the Microsoft HoloLens. The HoloLens is a Mixed Reality device which shows holograms over the real environment. The operator can view a virtual simulation of the proces before the program is executed. The program which runs on the HoloLens is connected with the ROS program and shares information with each other (e.g. joint states).
In the current state of the project a 3D printed product can be placed on the table. After that the robotarm will scan the product multiple times from different poses. When the product is scanned the tool-paths for finishing the product are calculated automatically. During the proces the robot will replace the grinding disks automatically.