Application of External Axis in Robot-Assisted Thermal Spraying

Currently, industrial robots are widely used in the process of thermal spraying because of their high efficiency, security, and repeatability. Although robots are found suitable for use in industrial productions, they have some natural disadvantages because of their six-axis mechanical linkages. When a robot performs a series of stages of production, it could be hard to move from one to another because a few axes reach their limit value. For this reason, an external axis should be added to the robot system to extend the reachable space of the robots. This article concerns the application of external axis on ABB robots in thermal spraying and the different methods of off-line programming with external axis in the virtual environment. The developed software toolkit was applied to coat real workpiece with a complex geometry in atmospheric plasma spraying).