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5-Axis Robot Carves Metal Like Butter
kkleiner sends along an amazing video of what robot-controlled machining is coming to. "Industrial robots are getting precise enough that they're less like dumb machines and more like automated sculptors producing artwork. Case in point: Daishin's Seki 5-axis mill. The Japanese company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year by using this machine to carve ... a full-scale motorcycle helmet out of one piece of aluminum. No breaks, no joints, the 5-Axis mill simply pivots and rotates to carve metal at some absurd angles. Every cut is guided by sophisticated 3-D design software (Openmind’s HyperMill)."
I read that as "Craves Metal" and was scared as hell.
I don't mean to take anything away from the Japanese who are clearly leading in the robotics industry. Especially with technologies like this, humanoid robots like Asimo, and even those creepy robots that have the bad latex skin, these are all really impressive displays of Japan's prowess in this field. More importantly, the control mechanisms are being refined at both the software and hardware interconnects, so this isn't just "robotics", but rather the whole field covers a much broader scope than merely software or just hardware.
Why isn't the U.S. leading in this area? Why have we decided that we're happy enough building Facebook applications? It's sad to see that we aren't as focused on building real systems that will have an actual physical impact on our surroundings. We took Laertes' ridiculous admonition "to thine own self be true" and turned ourselves and our energies into the very worst of what we are as a nation. We have become exactly what the Japanese saw 20 years ago: a nation of lazy, overpaid workers. And, I hate to say it, we are paying the price for that with our jobs.
It's a nice enough demo for a five-axis mill, but these are hardly new nor revolutionary in any way. These have been around for at least a decade, probably much longer.
You could create one awesome looking suit of armor with that.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Industrial robots are getting precise enough that they're less like dumb machines and more like automated sculptors producing artwork
No, the engineers who built them and the programmers who programmed them are the sculptors, the robots are simply sophisticated knives. They're tools that humans use to create the sculpture.
It isn't artificial intelligence, it's real. It's the programmer's intelligence.
Free Martian Whores!
I'm starting to get involved in CNC machining (hobbyist level). One of the things that is quite clear is that there are really no good open source CAM packages. For that matter, open source 3D CAD has a long way to go, although I have great hopes for FreeCAD (not ready yet, but huge progress in the past year). If someone out there is looking for a challenge, take a look at 3D CAM, starting with 3-axis milling. Toolpath planning is *hard*. Your problem: Here is an arbitrary chunk of arbitrary metal. Here is a list of arbitrarily shaped tools. Here is the work envelop of your machine. Here is a table of chiploads that won't break the tools. Here is a 3D CAD file. Produce gcode. gcode that will not break the tools, not crash into fixtures, not crash the machine, and can start with roughing cuts to carve the initial block to something close, and plan finishing cuts that give you the desired surface finish at the end. A do your debugging where a "crash" can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars in broken tools and machinery.
There are scads of youtube videos of multi-axis machining, from impellers to V8 engine blocks, that are several years old. But, way before youtube, in the 1970's, Japanese nine-axis milling machines helped Soviet designers make submarine propellers vastly quieter, meaning subs like the Soviet Typhoon-class were roughly as quiet as American subs had been for a while. The military and export implications of multi-axis milling machine technology was mentioned in US Congress debates at the time: In 1983-1984 the Japanese firm Toshiba sold sophisticated, nine axis milling equipment to the Soviets along with the computer control systems, which were developed by Norwegian firm Kongsberg Vaapenfabrik. U.S Navy officials and Congressmen announced that this technology enabled the Soviet submarine builders to produce more accurate and quieter propellers. So this is by no means new, but it sure is pretty.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
but will it blend?
Very nice. But not that unusual for a modern machine tool. Here's a Matsura mill doing much the same thing. It's the software that's interesting.
The current generation of machining software finally has constructive solid geometry that really works. The software can predict where the surface of the work is, as material is removed from it, and can reliably calculate clearances to the tools. I'm very impressed. This really works for arbitrary convex objects now. I've worked on collision detection enough to understand how hard that is.
Coordinating the multiple axes isn't the hard part. That's just relative transformation matrices, which has been done in computer graphics for many years. (Although the newer robot and machining systems understand some of the machine dynamics, and consider inertia. That's new.) It's the modeling of the surface as it changes that's hard.
This is very expensive software, but it's worth it. You need both HyperMill and either SolidWorks or Inventor. You design the part in SolidWorks or Inventor, then use HyperMill to generate the commands for the CNC machine. Total cost is upwards of $10,000. The CNC machine tool itself is relatively dumb; it's just running previously computed moves. The newer machine tools have software to display the 3D model and the tool, so you can check the planned moves against the actual ones when setting up.
Nobody machines consumer products out of solid blocks of metal except as a demo, of course. It takes hours to machine something that can be made in seconds by stamping or molding. Machine tools are used mostly to make stamping and molding dies, and one-off parts. Also, even in modest volumes, you don't start with plain blocks of metal. You cast or forge a blank and machine off the excess.
I thought it was making a T-800 skull.
And I almost bought a one-way ticket to Japan to save man kind.
Ever see gas turbines machined? Goes for cars too. A lot of very cool and useful things wouldn't be possible without awesome machine tools. The physics and math behind these things is pretty amazing too.
Mis-read the article. I'm not sure what Daishin Seiki actually does, looks like a prototype shop. They use hyperMill (tm) from Open Mind Technologies http://www.openmind-tech.com/.
So it is basically Daishin Seiki's demo of what they are capable of with a Deckel-Maho (German) machine and hyperMill (US)CAM software.
Granted, they appear to be multi-national.
http://www.openmind-tech.com/en/the_cam_company.html
I'm lost as to why Daishin Seki is getting credit here, other than a poor write up on someone's blog and a cool demo.
And on a personal note, I need to get my reading comprehension checked, or check my meds...
A helmet?
About five years ago at Oshkosh, Williams International was showing-off a compressor turbine hub assembly for their EJ-2 engine. It was milled from a single piece of metal; hub, compressor blades, everything. One piece.
A 'helmet.' Pbbbbbttttt. . . .
Regards;