Constructive compensation of the thermal behaviour for industrial robots

Industrial robot systems offer a flexible, adaptable basis due to their kinematics and their mobility An influencing variable, which is particularly relevant for processes with long process times, is the thermal heating and the associated thermal drift of the tool center point. The maximum deviation from the actual nominal position can reach up to ΔAPt = 1.5 mm. Currently, there are no procedures and methods established in practice which compensate the effects of thermal drift without expensive calibration measures and system downtime. In these investigations a system was developed which allows the reduction of thermally induced displacement by using controlled heating elements. The aim is to keep the entire robot system at a permanent, balanced temperature level. The heating elements are adapted to the geometry of the respective axis and heat the material to a temperature ϑ close to the steady state. A comparison of the drift through the heating system with the error occurring in normal operation shows that the drift of the heating system is comparable with the drift of normal heating. With the heating mats, a thermally induced error of ΔAPt = 0.234 mm can be generated within t = 20 min. While normal heating requires up to t = 600 min. The achieved error deviation of the drift of the self-heating to the heated variants is with ΔAP = 0.04 mm only minimal. The results can help to reduce the influence of thermal heating and the associated thermal drift of the TCP without using cost-intensive measures with additional hardware and software on external computers for compensating the errors.