A novel surface self-adapting small mobile robot for free-form surface polishing

The finish machining of large free-form is very difficult because of its very complicated surface and dimension. To improve the machining efficiency and quality of surface, a novel small mobile robot is designed to meet the demand for finish machining of large free-form surface. At first, the structure of the designed mobile robot is introduced and its kinematics analysis is deduced, the transformation matrices is also established. According to the above analysis, simulation work is performed by given an arc as the polishing path to verify the analysis results. Finally, it is proved that the proposed novel configuration of small mobile robot is feasible to polish a large free-form surface workpiece.