Manual handling of hot and heavy workpiece in forging press industry increases the process time and causes safety risks to workers. To increase the productivity and optimise the use of manpower, manipulators are needed to be designed for supporting the workers handling the workpiece. Designing robots for such applications is challenging since the robot suffers from a heavy payload at the arm tip, and it operates at a high speed in a large workspace. This research addresses the design and implementation of a novel robot for handling workpiece for a given forging press cell. A novel robotic mechanism is designed with two key features: (i) the addition of parallel links in between serial links and (ii) the use of hydraulic actuators for driving robot’s joints. The addition of parallel links and the use of hydraulic cylinders are to increase the structural rigidity. It is also to reduce the number of joint variables and restrict the end-effector moving parallel to the ground surface so that the robot grips and releases the workpiece in a more efficient and simplified manner. The effectiveness of the designed robot mechanism is demonstrated through functional tests, and experimental results are carried out on the implemented robot.

The singular points of a given 5-axis CNC machine could be found in the domain of the joint variables of the machine. In the neighbourhood of a singular point, even for a small change of the tooltip position, an enormous change of axis displacements of the machine is often required. This causes a large deviation between the real cutting path and the desired tool path, and the machining surface could be destroyed. This paper provides with an analytical scheme for identifying singular configuration of 5-axis CNC machines. In particular, an efficient and robust algorithm is proposed to compute the cutter path across the neighbourhood of the singular points identified such that the computed cutter path tracks the desired tool path within a controllable error. Numerical examples and real cutting parts are carried out and discussed to show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the presented method.

When a segment of a flexible link of a flexible robot is currently sliding through a prismatic joint, it is usually assumed that the elastic deformation of the segment equals to zero. This is a kind of time-dependent boundary condition when formulating the dynamics model of a flexible robot consisting of prismatic joints. Hence, the dynamic modeling and especially the inverse dynamic analysis of the flexible robots with the prismatic joints are challenging. In this article, we present a new development of the dynamic modeling method for a generic two-link flexible robot that consists of a prismatic joint and a revolute joint. Moreover, a new bisection method-based algorithm is proposed to analyze the inverse dynamic responses of the flexible robots. Since the bisection method is a rapid converging method in mathematics, the proposed algorithm is effectively applicable to solving the inverse dynamic problem of a flexible robot in a robust manner. Last, the numerical simulation results show the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed method.

A solution for integrating CAM (Computer - Aided Manufacturing) systems into multi-axis nutating table CNC (Computerized Numerical Control ) machines is presented in this paper. The strategy of the method is to build a CL data processing algorithm. Thus, the CL data in ISO format produced by every CAMs can be transformed and translated into G-codes files (Numerical Control files) for controlling CNC machines. An implementation of the integration and real tests performing on industrial 5-axis DMU 50e CNC machine at Dong Anh Mechanical Comp. are carried out to verify the research results.