In order to decrease the measuring cycle time on the coordinate measuring machine (CMM) a robot workstation for the positioning of measuring objects was created. The application of a simple 5-axis industrial robot enables the positioning of the objects within the working space of CMM and measuring of different surfaces on the same object without human intervention. In this article an upgrade of an existing robot workstation through different design measures is shown. The main goal of this upgrade is to improve the measuring accuracy of the complex robot-CMM system.

Coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) are widely used to check dimensions of manufactured parts, especially in the automotive industry. The major obstacles in automation of these measurements are fixturing and clamping assemblies, which are required in order to position the measured object within the CMM. This paper describes how an industrial robot can be used to manipulate the measured object within the CMM work space, in order to enable automation of complex geometry measurement.

Industrial robots are introduced to belt grinding processes of free-formed surface with elastic wheel nowadays in order to obtain high quality product and high efficiency. However, it is a laborious task to plan grinding paths and write programs for the robot. To release people from it partially, it is necessary to simulate the belt grinding processes which are useful for path generating and dynamic robot control. In this paper, we present a framework of the robot controlled belt grinding simulation system and some key issues in it. We enhance the global removal model to local process model, which can simulate the grinding process more exactly. We also point out the bottleneck of the real-time simulation and put forward a neural network based regression method to meet this difficulty. At the end of the paper, some simple simulation examples are given.