COMET

"Plug-and-produce COmponents and METhods for adaptive control of industrial robots enabling cost effective, high precision manufacturing in factories of the future"

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s challenging and dynamic economic environment forces European high-end manufacturing industry to focus on high flexibility, high quality, reliability and low life-cycle costs and to respond quickly to changes in this environment. The high-end manufacturing industry requests production systems that can quickly switch between diverse machining operations with short changeover, programming and set-up times without compromising quality, reliability or life-cycle costs. From a conceptual point of view, industrial robot technology could provide an excellent base for machining being both flexible (due to their lay-out) and cost efficient (robots cost 2-5 times less then machine tools). However, industrial robots lack absolute positioning accuracy (1), are unable to react in real time to changing process conditions (2) and lack reliable programming and simulation tools to ensure first time right machining once production commences (3). These three critical limitations prevent industrial robots from being integrated in high-end machining processes. The COMET consortium will provide a revolutionary Plug-and-Produce solution enabling the use of industrial robots for high end machining processes, appreciating the needs from the manufacturing industry for cost effective, flexible and reliable manufacturing solutions. The proposed solution will be on the average 30% more cost effective than dedicated machine tools whilst delivering absolute positional accuracy of at least 50 µm. Due to the sense of urgency in Europe’s manufacturing industry the COMET consortium defined an ambitious work plan of only 30 months to develop and demonstrate the innovations planned and meet the objectives set. These ambitious goals and the planned dissemination and training activities encourage a quick uptake by the manufacturing industry. Over a 5 years period, the estimated impact is 45M€ to 50M€ justifying the investment from the EC and the COMET partnership.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

The manufacturing industry makes a huge contribution to the European economy. EU-funded scientists developed a platform to exploit industrial robots to significantly reduce the time and cost of machining processes.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Funded by the EU, the http://www.cometproject.eu/ (COMET) project sought to overcome the major challenges that limit the current use of industrial robots for milling processes. Major issues are the lack of positioning accuracy and adaptability to changes in forces required for automotive and aerospace components as well as for the production of moulds, dies and high-precision parts. Concurrently, a dearth of advanced programming and simulation tools decreases the potential for getting a piece done correctly the first time.

COMET delivered four important techniques and technologies to enable the use of industrial robots in a plug-and-produce platform for cost-effective, reliable and flexible manufacturing. Scientists developed a methodology to extract machine-specific kinematic and dynamic models of industrial robots from every possible configuration. It employs an off-line kinematic calibration, a dynamic robot simulation with new measurements of robotic joint parameters and a novel process for force calculation. Accurate simulation of robot behaviours produces a unique signature for each robot.

The robot signature is then exploited in a simulation environment that enables adaptive robot path generation. An adaptive tracking system then monitors the actual path with respect to the programmed path, using an advanced robot controller to correct deviations in real time. Finally, a high dynamics compensation mechanism (HDCM) compensates for high-frequency position errors and transients. This provides a turbo-boost to accuracy, enabling precision far beyond the capability of the robot system alone. As an example, the mean absolute error of a test piece improved from 255 micrometres with no compensation to only 32 micrometres with the HDCM.

Test cases demonstrated that robot machining can significantly speed up processing compared to conventional computer-based numerical control methods. In addition, costs can be reduced by approximately 40 % with minimal to no impact on quality.

Results have been widely disseminated through numerous presentations, publications and videos targeting scientific audiences, industry, policymakers, the media and the general public. Commercialisation is expected to have widespread impact on the economic recovery and competitiveness of European manufacturers and the end users of their products.