Design, simulation, control of a hybrid pouring robot: enhancing automation level in the foundry industry

Currently, workers in sand casting face harsh environments and the operation safety is poor. Existing pouring robots have insufficient stability and load-bearing capacity and cannot perform intelligent pouring according to the demand of pouring process. In this paper, a hybrid pouring robot is proposed to solve these limitations, and a vision-based hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) control technology is designed to achieve the real-time control problems of simulated pouring and pouring process. Firstly, based on the pouring mechanism and the motion demand of ladle, a hybrid pouring robot with a 2UPR-2RPU parallel mechanism as the main body is designed. And the equivalent hybrid kinematic model was established by using Eulerian method and differential motion. Subsequently, a motion control strategy based on HIL simulation technique was designed and presented. The working space of the robot was obtained through simulation experiments to meet the usage requirements. And the stability of the robot was tested through the key motion parameters of the robot joints. Based on the analysis of pouring quality and trajectory, optimal dynamic parameters for the experimental prototype are obtained through water simulation experiments, the pouring liquid height area is 35–40 cm, the average flow rate of pouring liquid is 112 cm3/s, and the ladle tilting speed is 0.0182 rad/s. Experimental results validate the reasonableness of the designed pouring robot structure. Its control system realizes the coordinated movement of each branch chain to complete the pouring tasks with different variable parameters. Consequently, the designed pouring robot will significantly enhance the automation level of the casting industry.