Editorial

Citation

Loughlin, C. (1998), "Editorial", Industrial Robot, Vol. 25 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.1998.04925daa.001

Editorial

One of the first industrial applications that I was ever asked to look at concerned the polishing of the moulds for plastic lenses and reflectors such as are used in car indicator light assemblies. At the time this was a largely manual exercise in patience and determination to attain the required surface finish without unduly distorting the optical characteristics. A major problem (about 20 years ago) was the lack of force feedback in the robots available.

With a few exceptions this is still the case today. In the main robots are designed to move to positions in 3D space and stay there as accurately as possible until required to move elsewhere. I have a bee in my bonnet about calibration but that is a different issue; for now take it that robots are primarily designed to move from one intended position to another and anything that gets in the way (e.g. flash on a casting) had better watch out.

At the time of my opening example I recall that my colleagues and I tried to convince the manufacturer that polishing should be possible with a standard industrial robot. Like many others at the time we thought robots could do anything, and besides we needed to file a grant application and were dying to have an excuse to get a real robot in the university research lab. Fortunately the manufacturer did not believe us.

Polishing is a process whereby scratches are replaced by finer scratches until the desired finish is obtained. You start off with a fine grit and then progress in many stages to finer and finer grits until you are using something with a texture of very, very fine toothpaste. If you started off with the toothpaste you would only achieve a surface of polished ridges.

Polishing is a highly skilled activity as many people who have tried to automate the process have found out. It is highly qualitative, relying on the person's skill to determine how much rubbing force to apply and when to change to a finer grade of grit ­ basically it requires skills that your average industrial robot simply does not have.

However, there is a different branch of the robot family that has routinely had force feedback and that is teleoperator robotics. Here the emphasis is on control and feedback rather than absolute positioning. We are now seeing industrial robots beginning to incorporate these teleoperator force feedback characteristics and coincidentally are also seeing teleoperator robots including the industrial robot facilities of "teach and repeat" as well as absolute positioning. Perhaps a merging of these two disciplines together with external inspection systems will open the door for this "new" application for robotics?

Clive Loughlin