Robotic milling for rapid ceramic prototyping

Robotic milling is a developing method for rapidly producing prototypes and parts, but the application is limited for materials such as wax, wood, plastic and light metal, etc. The reason for this is because of the robotic weak rigidity. In this paper, a method of robotic milling for ceramic prototyping is developed, one that has been successfully applied in a new rapid hard tooling technology-Direct Prototype Spray Tooling([1]). At first, the appropriate ceramic materials mixed with metal powder are confirmed for the robotic milling and the following plasma spraying process. Then the 6-DOF robotic milling paths are extracted from the NC code and transformed into the robotic JBI type file, the NC code generated through the general CAD/CAM software such as UG-NX. Finally, the robotic milling characteristics such as moving path accuracy and milling force are tested to find the best milling parameters and to ensure the executable, accurate and efficient ceramic prototype milling technology. The development of this method not only broadens the robotic milling material range but also extends the rapid prototyping fields. It can also be used for producing ceramic parts that are difficult to machine.