Exteriors of structures (apartments, buildings, bridges, dams, power plants, etc.) are subject to deterioration and damage (cracks, rust, etc.), mainly due to thermal expansion/contraction and environmental humidity. The damages shorten the lifespan of structures and cause unnecessary reconstruction, increasing social costs. The existing damage maintenance methods, which are directly constructed by the workers, have problems such as reduced work efficiency, increased work cost, lack of timely maintenance, and high work risks. In this paper, a spraying device attached to a drone for active and flexible maintenance of structures is developed. To simplify maintenance, the device consists of a solenoid motor, detachable parts for maintenance agent, and a lightweight-designed frame, manufactured with a 3D printer. In particular, the lever mechanism that amplifies the pushing force of the solenoid motor is designed to spray the maintenance agent when a switch comes into contact with the exterior of the structure. The prototype of a spraying device is attached to a commercial drone (Mavic3, DJI) and tested for effectiveness in structure maintenance. It demonstrates successful, cost-effective maintenance of structural damages in less than 10 minutes.

Tool-center-point (TCP) calibration and geometric error identification procedures are proposed to improve the accuracy of a 6-axis manipulator with a tilting rotary table. The accuracy of a 6-axis manipulator is affected by the accuracy of TCP calibration. In general, TCP calibration of the 6-axis manipulator uses a conical fixture provided by the manufacturer. However, since a TCP cannot be accurately positioned to the tip of the conical fixture repeatedly, a large positional deviation occurs at the calibration depending on the worker proficiency. Thus, accuracies of TCP calibration and the 6-axis manipulator are reduced. In this paper, a 3-DOF measuring device, consisting of a nest with three dial gauges and a precision ball, is developed to calibrate the TCP and to improve the accuracy of the 6-axis manipulator. Then, geometric errors of a tilting rotary table are identified via double ball-bar measurements according to the ISO 10791-6 with TCP initial alignment using an extension fixture. Finally, proposed TCP calibration and geometric error identification procedures are validated experimentally, and they show improvements in positional accuracy by 55 and 90%, respectively.

In ultra-precision processes, such as aerospace parts and precision mold machining, the accuracy of a feed drive system should be secured to achieve sufficient form accuracy. Dual-Servo stages, which compensate for multi-DOF motion errors, are being developed depending on the applied processes. This paper deals with the fine stage of a dual-servo stage to compensate for 6-DOF motion errors of a linear stage. The proposed fine stage measured 6-DOF errors of the linear stage motion with capacitive sensors, a reference mirror, and an optical encoder. It compensated for the errors using the flexure hinge mechanism with piezo actuators. The error equations and the inverse kinematics were derived to calculate the 6- DOF errors and displacements of piezo actuators for 6-DOF motions, respectively. Performance evaluation was implemented to verify feasibility of the developed fine stage of the fabricated dual-servo stage. Through the step response test of the fine stage, compensation resolutions for the translational and the rotational motion were confirmed to be less than 10 nm and 1/3 arcsec, respectively. The 6-DOF motion errors in the verification test were reduced by 73% on average.

ISO 10791-6 specifies test conditions, BK1 and BK2, including circularly interpolated motions by simultaneous control of two linear axes and a rotary/tilting axis, for five-axis machine tools with a tilting-rotary table. Eccentricities of measured motions are used to identify position-independent geometric errors of the rotary/tilting axis. However, time-consuming alignments of measurement devices are required to execute the circular motions due to large geometric errors of the tilting axis. In this paper, a simple method is proposed to align an initial position of a tool-center-point (TCP) relative to the actual tilting axis of five-axis machine tools for application of ISO 10791-6. A ball at the tool nose with an extension fixture, supplied commercially by a double ball-bar manufacturer, is used to measure positional deviations of a ball on workpiece table at 90° command angle of a tilting axis. An alignment error of a TCP is identified simply by using a geometric relationship of the TCP and measured deviations. Then, identified alignment errors are used to calculate initial position of a TCP for fine measurements of position-independent geometric errors specified in ISO 10791-6. The proposed method is applied to a five-axis machine tool and verified experimentally.

A new technique based on the reversal method, is suggested to measure squareness error of the two-linear axes system. The technique uses the L-type steel bar, a capacitive sensor, and three experimental installations required to measure squareness error and two horizontal straightness errors. Profile and squareness of the L-type steel bar are estimated, by using the principle of the reversal method. Also, setup errors inevitable at installation, are separated from measured data using the least square method. Multi-DOF errors of two-linear axes system are measured and analyzed, using the suggested technique. Also, the reference mirror with flatness of 30 nm is used to verify the suggested measurement technique. Difference between the two measurement methods is 3.25 arcsec, a value within measurement repeatability.

In the manufacture of mechanical components, volumetric errors of a machine tool should be checked and reduced to meet the required tolerance levels. In this paper, we propose a quick and simple method of measurement for checking and compensating geometric errors which include scaling and squareness errors. During the measurement, which usually takes approximately 5 minutes to complete, the machine tool is first commanded into four vertices sequentially on a virtual regular tetrahedron. Subsequently, the six lengths between four vertices are measured using a double ball-bar and geometric errors are calculated from the measured lengths. In order to verify the measurement result, the measured geometric errors are compensated using NC-code and the six lengths are re-measured to confirm the error correction. In conclusion, a double ball-bar circular test on XY-, YZ-, ZX-plane is done, first without compensation and then with the compensation of the measured geometric errors to check the effect of compensation practically.

In this study, the five-DOF motion at ultra-precision linear stage under static and dynamic conditions are evaluated through the extending application of ISO 230-2. As the performance factors, the bi-directional accuracy and repeatability of the five-DOF motion are quantitatively evaluated with the measurement uncertainties which are determined using the standard uncertainty of equipment used in experiment. The motion under static condition are analyzed using geometric errors. The five geometric errors except the linear displacement error are measured using optimal measurement system which is designed to enhance the standard uncertainty of geometric errors. In addition, the motion under dynamic conditions are analyzed with respect to the conditions with different feed rate of the stage. The experimental results shows that the feed rate of stage has a significant effect on straightness motions.

In this study, a measurement method of double ball-bar is proposed to measure the geometric errors of an ultra-precision roll mold machine tool. A volumetric error model of the machine tool is established to investigate the effects of the geometric errors to a radius error and a cylindricity of the roll mold. A measurement path is suggested for the geometric errors, and a ball-bar equation is derived to represent the relation between the geometric errors and a measured data of the double ball-bar. Set-up errors, which are inevitable at the double ball-bar installation, also are analyzed and are removed mathematically for the measurement accuracy. In addition, standard uncertainty of the measured geometric errors is analyzed to determine the experimental condition. Finally, the proposed method is tested and verified through simulation.

In this paper, double ball-bar is used to estimate the geometric errors of a rotary table, which includes one-axial motion, two-radial motions and two-tilt motions, except the angular positioning error. To simplify the measurement procedures, three measurement steps have been designed and developed. At each measurement step, one end of the double ball-bar is fixed at the nose of spindle and the other end is located on the rotary table. And specific circular test path is planned to keep the distance between two balls as constant at ideal case. The relationship including the geometric errors of a rotary table and the measured distance between two balls which is distorted by the geometric errors is defined by using ball-bar equation. Each geometric error is modeled as 4^th order polynomial considering C¹-continuity. Finally the coefficients of polynomial are calculated by least-square method. Simulation is done to check the validation of the suggested method considering set-up errors and measurement noise. Suggested method is applied to estimate geometric errors of a rotary table of a 5-axis machine tool.

Long stroke Fast Tool Servo (LFTS) with maximum stroke of 432 ㎛ is designed, manufactured and tested for fabrication of optical free-form surfaces. The large amount of stroke in LFTS has been realized by utilizing the hinge and lever mechanisms which enable the displacement amplification ratio of 4.3. In this mechanism the peculiar shape was devised for maximizing the displacement of end tip in LFTS and special mechanical spring has been mounted to provide the sufficient preload to the piezoelectric actuator. Also, its longitudinal motion of tool tip can be measured by capacitive type displacement sensor and closed-loop controlled to overcome the nonlinear hysteresis. In order to verify the static and dynamic characteristics of designed LFTS, several features including step response, frequency response and cut-off frequency in closed-loop mode were experimentally examined. Also, basic machining result shows that the proposed LFTS is capable of generating the optical free-form surface as an additional axis in diamond turning machine

An important component of a cooling tower is an axial fan, and there happens distortion in its shape which brings significant loss of efficiency. In this paper, a surface profile measuring system for large size axial fan of cooling towers is developed. A laser sensor is used as a measuring device and aluminum profiles and stepping motors are engaged into the system as frame structure and driving devices respectively. The measuring data are compared to the design data to compute the distortion of the axial fans. Two types of errors, axial and twist errors, are used to represent the precision of axial fan distortion. Genetic algorithm is used to solve the optimization problem during computing the precision. Results are displayed three dimensionally in a solid-modeler as well as 2-D drawings to help users find it with ease.