CAM system without using robot language for an industrial robot RV1A

In this manuscript, CAM system for an articulated-type industrial robot RV1A is described from the view point of robotic servo controller. It is defined here that CAM system includes an important function which allows an industrial robot to move along cutter location data (CL data) consisting of position and orientation components. Another important point is that the proposed CAM system has a high applicability to other industrial robots whose servo systems are technically opened to end-user engineers. The CAM system works as a flexible interface without any robot language between CAD/CAM and industrial robots. At the present stage, unfortunately, the relationship between CAD/CAM and industrial robots are not deep compared to NC machine tools widely spread in manufacturing industries. CAM system for NC machine tools is already established for the standardization due to the NC data, however, CAM system for industrial robots has not been sufficiently considered for the standardization yet. An on-line teaching with a teaching pendant is generally required in almost all cases to obtain teaching data according to each industrial robot. Off-line teaching systems by using a CAD/CAM are also proposed, however, there exist too many types of robot languages to standardize them like NC data. Here, in order to raise the relationship between a CAD/CAM and an industrial robot, a simple CAM system without using any robot languages is proposed. The basic design of the CAM system and an experimental result are shown.