CAD/CAM developer Delcam recently hosted the inaugural meeting of the 8-million-euro COMET project in Alicante, Spain. COMET is an effort to enable cost-effective, flexible and reliable manufacturing solutions by developing plug-and-produce COmponents and METhods for adaptive control of industrial robots in high-end machining.
From a conceptual point of view, robots could provide an excellent base for machining because their layouts are flexible and they tend to cost two to five times less than machine tools. However, robots have not been employed in most machining applications due to three critical limitations: they lack absolute positioning accuracy; they are unable to compensate for deviations caused by process forces; and they lack reliable programming and simulation tools to ensure correct first-part machining.
Innovations to overcome these limitations proposed by the COMET consortium include an adaptive robot toolpath generation system based on kinematic and dynamic models, an adaptive tracking system, and a high dynamic compensation mechanism. According to Delcam, these innovations will improve robot accuracy, reduce setup times by as much as 50 percent and enable precise first-time programming and simulation with real-time correction of the robot path.
Delcam, headquartered in Birmingham, UK, is one of 14 technical partners from eight European countries that form the consortium. Other partners include Nikon (Belgium), ARTIS (Germany), AMRC (UK), TEKS (France), Fraunhofer IPA (Germany), BTU (Germany), Lund University (Sweden), Gizelis (Greece), University of Patras (Greece), N Bazigos (Greece), DemoCenter Sipe (Italy) and Nisaform (Czech Republic).
For more information about the COMET project, visit cometproject.eu.
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