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.

The collaboration of robots and humans sharing workspace, can increase productivity and reduce production costs. However, occupational accidents resulting in injuries can increase, by removing the physical safety around the robot, and allowing the human to enter the workspace of the robot. In preventing occupational accidents, studies on recognizing humans, by installing various sensors around the robot and responding to humans, have been proposed. Using the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor, a wider range can be measured simultaneously, which has advantages in that the LiDAR sensor is less impacted by the brightness of light, and so on. This paper proposes a simple and fast method to recognize humans, and estimate the path of humans using a single stationary 360° LiDAR sensor. The moving object is extracted from background using the occupied grid map method, from the data measured by the sensor. From the extracted data, a human recognition model is created using CNN machine learning method, and the hyper-parameters of the model are set, using a grid search method to increase accuracy. The path of recognized human is estimated and tracked by the extended Kalman filter.

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.

The directed energy deposition (DED) process has been used for enhancement of the mechanical property, repair, and part manufacturing. Post-process machining is required due to the low quality of the DED printed part. Even if the part is printed under similar conditions, dimensional variations occur frequently due to the accumulation of small printing errors. Due to tool overfeeding and the occurrence of the non-cutting area due to this variation, the quality of the finished part is not guaranteed. Therefore, the post-process machining should be carried out considering the actual printed part shape. Herein, the flexible post-process machining is proposed by utilizing the shape information through the on-machine measurement (OMM) of DED printed parts. The process margin for machining the design shape is calculated through the OMM of the geometric dimension of the printed part. Feedrate (Override) and machining path of each printing parts are flexibly determined depending on the process margin. This technique is applied to the pocket shape part printed with STS 316L material, and the rough and finish machining conditions are established. Rough machining time was reduced by adjusting the feedrate flexibly. The final form of accuracy and surface roughness were achieved under 30 and 0.25 μm, respectively.

Industrial robots are widely used for part manufacturing besides simple task (welding, assembly). A parallel kinematic machine (PKM) with extending axes have been utilized in large volume machining because of their adequate stiffness and agility. Parallelism error in the PKM with an extending axis causes deterioration of dimensional accuracy of machined parts. This paper proposes a technique for compensating the parallelism error through measurement of the squareness error between the PKM with its extending axes using a laser interferometer. The four squareness errors are estimated to reduce the parallelism errors. The squareness error is calculated by measuring linearity of the extending axis and the PKM moving axis, and through the measurement of diagonal displacement error and position dependent geometric errors. Compensation of the parallelism error was done by transforming the basic coordinate system of the PKM. The parallelism error was significantly reduced from 0.735 to 0.022 mm and further 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.

This paper presents the acceleration and deceleration control of free-form surfaces. A rapid variation of acceleration (or Deceleration) drives the system into a machine shock, resulting in the inaccuracy of the path control of the NURBS curve. The pattern of acceleration control can be established using the curvature of the NURBS curve. The curvature can be easily calculated from the first and second derivative of the NURBS curve used in Taylor’s expansion for NURBS interpolation. However, the derivatives are not used in the recursive method for NURBS interpolation. Hence, we attempted the difference-derivatives for calculating the NURBS curvature. Both, Taylor’s expansion and the recursive method, are used jointly for controlling the acceleration in the same interpolation algorithm.

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.

This paper presents an experimental study of a vibration-assisted dry micro-wire electrical discharge machining (μ-WEDM) utilized in high precision and micro-manufacturing area. The assisted vibration was applied to the workpiece using a piezoelectric actuator, and high pressure air was injected directly into the machining gap through a nozzle. Investigation experiments were performed to estimate the importance of input parameters and it was observed from experiment results that the width (kerf) of the cutting slot and the machining time were significantly affected by the air injection pressure and input energy. Moreover, it was also observed that there exists an optimal relationship between the machining time and input parameters including the air pressure and vibration frequency and amplitude. Central composite design based experiments were also carried out, and empirical models of the machining time and cutting slot kerf have been developed using the response surface methodology to analyze and optimize the process.

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.

The squareness measurement of driving axes of a machine tool is very important to evaluate the performance of the machine. Laser interferometer measurement system is one of the most reliable equipment to measure the squareness. However, squareness measurement using laser system with an optical square result in restriction of straightness optics setup and Abbe’s offset. This offset combines with angular errors during the motion of an axis to cause Abbe’s error. In addition, the difficulty in optical square setup causes restriction of other optics and limitation of measurable range. In this paper, mathematical approaches are presented to eliminate the Abbe’s error and to estimate squareness for full range by using the best fit of straightness data measured without an optical square. Experiments for squareness measurement of 3 axis machine tool were conducted and the proposed techniques were used for squareness evaluation with elimination of Abbe’s error and squareness estimation for the full travel range.

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.