The following is an excerpt from a summary report from Ford Vehicle Operations
As a pilot project in preparation for the B-Car project, the full service suppliers Kuka, Valiant/Steelweld, and ComauPICO committed to design and fully (including calibration) offline program (OLP) nearly 100 robots for the CD132 vehicle at Genk. Several tests, especially involving the DynaCal calibration tool, have been conducted by group staff and the Genk plant maintenance department, but CD132 is the first production program to utilize the OLP technology to achieve a “no manual touch up” level of accuracy. With the help of plant maintenance staff, and Dynalog, the work was completed for all robots within two days, and accuracy checks (visual against a prototype panel) looked good. To quantify the accuracy, a test program was created and downloaded to one robot, and the measured accuracy was less than 1mm, which achieved the desired goal. Better accuracy could be achieved through better design and repeatability of the End of Arm Tool. Additional maintenance related benefits were identified by the Genk plant staff, resulting in a project to calibrate all the V184 body shop robots as well.
The Dynalog calibration system delivered the required accuracy for generating production programs offline without the need for sheet metal or position “touch-up”. Further verification of the accuracy is planned for these cells by measuring the resulting spots on a CMM and comparing that to the CAD data targets. While the fastest measurement time achieved for these six robots was 45 minutes, the goal of 30 minutes or less still seems regularly achievable based on other projects.
Beyond basic OLP
Having completed the calibration process once, the programs and data are available for the plant maintenance staff for:
Offline generated robot program changes (supporting running changes).
Debugging – identifying changes in TCP, robot mastering, or fixture positioning.
Re-calibrating in the event of crash or maintenance operation
Re-filtering existing programs (whether created by hand or through OLP) to a replacement robot (e.g. a swapped robot due to a maintenance issue)
Transferring programs between robots working on a parallel or mirrored process (the filter compensates for the mechanical differences between the robots, as well as differences in the TCP and fixture alignment).
Related Topics
DynaCal Robot Calibration System
The DynaCal system delivers the highest possibly Absolute Accuracy for your complete robot-cell. The system comes with its own proprietary measurement hardware, but is also compatible with laser trackers, camera-based systems, etc.
A robot is generally capable of repeating the same move towards a specific point in space, over and over, within a high level of tolerance (referred to as 'unidirectional Repeatability'), generally well below 0.1mm.
Robots have historically been taught manually, i.e. using the robot's 'teach pendant' to manually drive the robot's TCP to the desired point along the part to be operated on, while visually verifying – as much as feasible ...
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As a pilot project in preparation for the B-Car project, the full service suppliers Kuka, Valiant/Steelweld, and ComauPICO committed to design and fully (including calibration) offline program (OLP) nearly 100 robots for the CD132 vehicle at Genk. Several tests, especially involving the DynaCal calibration tool, have been conducted by group staff and the Genk plant maintenance department, but CD132 is the first production program to utilize the OLP technology to achieve a “no manual touch up” level of accuracy. With the help of plant maintenance staff, and Dynalog, the work was completed for all robots within two days, and accuracy checks (visual against a prototype panel) looked good. To quantify the accuracy, a test program was created and downloaded to one robot, and the measured accuracy was less than 1mm, which achieved the desired goal. Better accuracy could be achieved through better design and repeatability of the End of Arm Tool. Additional maintenance related benefits were identified by the Genk plant staff, resulting in a project to calibrate all the V184 body shop robots as well.
