Programming of an industrial robot for plasma cutting

Details

Supervisors

Ronsse, Renaud ; Moutschen, Cédric

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil électromécanicien, à finalité spécialisée: mécatronique

Abstract

Nowadays, industrial robots are used to perform a wide range of tasks including the manufacturing of vehicles and the cleaning of surfaces located in very dangerous places like the windows of a skyscraper. They are also required to execute dangerous process like the plasma cutting of metal plates in which the temperature of the plasma arc that cuts the metal plates reaches almost 3 times the temperature of the surface of the sun. That process requires highly experienced operators to obtain a high quality or high speed production. Sometimes the exigency of the client in quality and speed can be extremely demanding for an operator. In those cases, the usage of an industrial robot to perform plasma cutting becomes very handy. The company Imax Pro is one of the companies that wants to enable an industrial robot to perform plasma cutting of metal plates. Imax Pro developed a virtual simulator to program that robot in an efficient way. The virtual robot of that simulator can be used instead of the robot to test new programs of tasks while the robot is still working to produce income for the company. Besides, that simulator presents the virtual robot performing plasma cutting to permit the client or operator to see and analyse how the process will be executed by the robot. Nevertheless, that simulator lacks some important characteristics like the adjustment of the trajectory of the plasma torch according to the material removed during the process to obtain the correct size of the cut part. Besides, the simulator should be capable of generating automatically the program of the robot according to the shape and size of the metal part and the characteristics of the production that the operators chooses. There are thus some improvements to implement on that simulator. This master thesis tackled the obstacles encountered while programming the simulator and the robot to implement those improvements. As a result, a simulator capable of creating automatically a program for an industrial robot to perform plasma cutting was obtained. That program contains the instructions of movement and usage of the plasma torch to plasma cut metal parts following the recommendations of a manual of plasma cutting. This manuscript presents the components involved in the process of plasma cutting with an industrial robot and, the programming steps executed to improve the simulator of Imax Pro and give it the capability of creating automatically the program of the robot. Furthermore, it presents the plasma cutting tests performed using the robot and an analysis of the results of those tests. The consideration of some of the recommendations of the manual of plasma cutting leads to the manufacturing of good quality metal parts. Nonetheless, to reach high quality in the manufacturing of those parts, many adjustments must be done to the parameters that affect the process and, more recommendations from the manual must be taken into account. Finally, this thesis presents proposals for future work that can be done to enhance the quality of the results obtained with the program generated by the simulator. Besides, it presents other proposals that can increase the efficiency and save resources of the company.