SENSORS IN MANUFACTURING


Profile sensor cuts the grind


Light weight, high resolution laser profile sensors are being used in the nuclear industry for smart robotic grinding on welded structures


deburring system for the kind of welded components and structures used in the nuclear power industry. The sensor is mounted to a robot end effector and measures the profile of welded joints and planar surfaces. Coroma is a robotic system development and


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integration project to automate a variety of manufacturing tasks. Most of these tasks are secondary finishing operations – such as grinding, sanding and deburring – which are typically carried out manually on welded components such as nuclear fuel racks and tube structures. According to Ozan Gurdal, a research engineer at


Nuclear AMRC, manual finishing can take dozens of hours of cycle time, as well as being a health and safety issue. “The idea of the Coroma project was to use robots to automate these processes with sensor and software assistance and to demonstrate the work on full-scale demonstrators provided by the companies that plan to operate them,” says Gurdal.


SMART ROBOTIC INTERVENTION Nuclear AMRC’s involvement in the project was to develop a smart robotic grinding and deburring system for welded components. The owner of the application project was Equipos Nucleares SA, a nuclear fabrication organisation in Spain. “We developed an integrated end effector for the


robot with a Micro-Epsilon 2910-100 BL laser profile sensor on one end and a pneumatic spindle on the other. This would eliminate the need to use a tool changing system, which would stand out as an expensive item,” says Gurdal. He went on to explain that it is not possible to use


the part’s design CAD model when it comes to programming robots for weld grinding or conditioning as there is a significant difference between the design and actual as-welded part because distortion and warpage is inevitable during welding.


22 /// Testing & Test Houses /// February 2020


❱❱ The laser profile sensor from Micro-Epsilon can be used as a plug-and-play with easy integration with such software packages as LabVIEW, above; a profile sensor mounted onto a robot arm is used for measuring the profiles of critical welded joints in finished structures. The scanCONTROL sensor is mounted to a robot end effector and measures the profile of welded joints and planar surfaces, above right; the scanCONTROL 2910-100_BL laser profile sensor can be mounted directly onto a robot end effector and integrated into the manufacturing and inspection processes


“This difference is sufficient to affect robot paths


and so exact weld sizes are unknown. Therefore, the 3D CAD model of the as-welded part is required to program paths accurately,” explains Gurdal.


PROFILE EVALUATION The scanCONTROL 2910-100_BL laser sensor held by the end effector is used to scan the areas of interest on the part. These include welded joints and planar surfaces used for reference. The sensor provides the axial and lateral distance (2D) measurements between the scanned object and sensor frame. This in itself is not sufficient for reconstruction of the part as a 3D CAD model for evaluation. Therefore, the 2D data obtained from the laser


sensor is combined with the position of the robot flange, which is read in real time from the robot controller using a LabVIEW-based central controller. Combining these two pieces of information, the central controller can generate the 3D reconstruction of the as-welded part as a point-cloud and converts it into the desired CAD format. According to Gurdal, the 3D CAD model of the


as-welded part is then used to generate grinding and deburring paths either offline using CAM or


2D laser profile sensor from Micro- Epsilon is being used by the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing and Research Centre (Nuclear AMRC) in a project to develop a smart robotic grinding and


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