Structural Design and Material Cutting Using a Laser End Effector on a Robot Arm

Abstract

The paper deals with the structural design of a laser end effector for the arm of the ABB IRB 140 robot which makes products by the laser cutting technology involving soft materials, such as e.g. paper, wood and others. A laser with a power of 1 W was chosen to carry out the cutting. An electrical circuit with a power supply was created for the selected laser; a control method and a structural design of the jig to be attached to the flange of the robot arm were proposed. Subsequently, the robot control program was connected to the control via a computer and the RoboDK simulation software. The paper describes in more detail the creation of the robot control program and the simulation designed in the simulation software environment, as well as the programming of laser control scripts in Python and in the programming environment of Arduino microcontroller.