Region-adaptive path planning for precision optical polishing with industrial robots

In the field of ultra-precision manufacturing, industrial robotic polishing has the potential to become a more economical and intelligent method than the conventional polishing machines. But the challenge of the robotic polishing lies in the low control accuracy, which seriously affects the polishing quality. In this paper a new region-adaptive path planning method is proposed, where the path is generated adaptively according to the specific form error. Each time only the regions with form error large enough are processed, thereby improving the polishing stability and efficiency. Smooth paths are generated based on the hexagonal meshing of the processing regions to avoid sharp turning, and then the dwell time is calculated by space-variant deconvolution. The PVr metric of the final form error resulting from the robotic polisher converges down to λ/15. In addition this method can reduce the polishing time by 80%, henceforth the stability and efficiency of robotic polishing can be greatly improved.