A new contact force estimation technique is proposed. Keeping the contact force at a certain level between finishing tool and the object is essential since the quality of the finished surface is very sensitive to the contact force during the finishing process. However, the contact force measurement cannot be obtained by simply installing load cells under machine table or in the middle of tool linkage. The reason is that the weight of the machine table and the tool linkage are much heavier than the force to be measured. To that end, a method for estimating disturbance is proposed for a system that is similar to the mechanism of the finishing machine, and the same method is applied to estimate the contact force of the brush-type finishing machine. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a small scale test set-up has been built and the method has been tested.
