Development of a multisensory arm for process monitoring in Robot Assisted Polishing

A multisensory polishing arm with integrated three component force sensor, a miniature acoustic emission (AE) sensor and an accelerometer was developed for process monitoring in Robot Assisted Polishing (RAP) process. The arm design was optimized for integration of a force and an AE sensor. The force sensor, consisted of semiconductor and metallic strain gauges, was calibrated by means of static application of defined loads. The sensor performance in a dynamic application was subsequently verified by comparison with a reference calibrated dynamometer on a dedicated test rig. To compensate for measurement bias caused by the inertial component due to the mass of the oscillating arm, acceleration is measured, inertia component calculated and subtracted from the measurements. The results demonstrate the suitability of the custom designed multisensory polishing arm for process monitoring in all RAP process configurations. Sensor, Development, Force, In-process measurement