Robotic surface simulation involves things such as surface painting, shot painting to strengthen surfaces, blasting and polishing. Now we're able to have very robust cell setup as well as a streamlined process. In doing this, the robustness comes from the fact that all modern surface processes are supported. We're able to do things such as masking and waypoints and very streamlined that after we define the profile, the trajectory in the surface operation, we can optimize and simply download the program. So here we have the tree structure of the manufacturing surface simulation, which includes the manufacturing cell itself as highlighted. We also include a rail system which the robot can run on. It’s a seventh axis single axis. We have a Fanuc robot which is the paint robot. We also have a manufacturing product, part of a fuselage, and we have a some sort of a jig or fixture to hold the manufacturing product is expressed in a tool, equipment and, even the stand to hold the jig or fixture itself. We include a control equipment. We don't see something physically on the screen, but we have it in the as a placeholder that controls the robot. And the seventh axis system itself. It's a control equipment and leads to those behaviors. Finally, we have here a paint gun that's mounted to the end of the robot and actually a polishing gun, a polishing tool as well. So those are our elements of our paint surface simulation. Here we're seen applying an initial condition known as a simulation state to the cell. we are hiding the polishing gun, setting up the robot to avoid singularity. And the nice thing is that we can have as many simulation states as we want. The end result of our simulation setup should be something like this. where the robot and the rail deposit, the film deposit, the paint. and we can see clearly the cone shape of the paint deposition. And this is after the paint profile. The trajectory and the surface task have been defined. So the question now is how do we get there? Defining the various profile parameters is extremely important to the integrity of the simulation. Regardless of what kind of process you're using. Now here we're going to see how we can define a paint profile. Of course, the gun itself has to be close enough to the manufacturing product for film deposition, we have three tabs paint, position and calibration. The position tab here tells us where the stream or the, shape of the paint deposition is in regards to the U frame. So here we can see a -300. We can move it back in Z to zero. of course that's not where we want it. We want it to come out of the gun. So we're going to set the z value to -300. We also have the calibration tab which is very heavy dependent upon the paint gun manufacturer or the integrator for values. So we have paint, position and calibration tabs. All these work together. And much of this is not experimental but rather from the paint gun manufacturer. And here we have film deposition, the cone shape. We can see that the thickness and microns is smallest in the x and y direction at the outsides. And of course, greatest as you come in towards the center of the stream, after defining the paint or polishing profile, we have to define the surface trajectory as shown here. So we first have to click on a surface and it gives us the stroke pattern. Whether it's zigzag one way we have the option of changing those and changing the vias and changing the directions. There's many different functions and abilities. If we need to add a surface, we can click on the geometries button and click on another surface and it updates dynamically the extent of our strokes and the width. If we need to change the distance between strokes, between swipes of the paint gun. we can change it here in the distance variable, between strokes, perhaps we have updated the paint gun characteristics, and we need to change that distance, and it automatically, dynamically adjusts and becomes greater or smaller depending on our value. We can also change the approach direction, whether the gun comes from behind or in front of the surface. The sweep direction simply by double clicking on the actual, solid blue arrows, we can change from up and down to left and right, the corner that it starts at. And also we can dynamically change the extents of where these strokes will be. continued. In case we, we need some overspray and then we need to go further beyond the extents of the manufacturing product. So many, many different options that we can adjust either making these, stroke smaller, adjusting for windows. And of course, once we're done, we can say, okay, after basic trajectory creation, we need to create a surface task. So we hit the surface task button. And of course select the applicable robot that we want to create a surface task for. In that Create Operations dialog box we have to select a trajectory. We can name the task. We can also set different parameters such as two profiles, paint profiles, waypoints, and other things. After selecting okay we have a surface task in our behaviour category tab. But we can clearly see that the robot cannot reach all of those targets. So in order to make this work, we're going to have to program the auxiliary axis in the programing tab. select the command compute all and select a strategy for the rail movement. After doing this, we can run the task and we can see that the robot can, along with the, dolly, can reach all the points. During surface programing and while running the surface simulation, the teach window can be displayed, which not only shows each paint operation, trigger or activation of the nozzles, but also all the various settings can be observed and edited if necessary. Very convenient triggers or brush activations that are on or off can be edited and enabled. Here in the teach window we can see the different options. We can also set clash to make sure that the robot in its travels clears all obstacles, including the fixtures and the manufacturing product. In addition, during analysis, we can of course display the paint deposition as a color, but we can change the simulation options to change to threshold, in which a legend will be displayed as to the micron deposition of paint thickness. And of course, our goal is to get as consistent of a coverage as possible if we want to do masking, for example, a window, an area that we don't want to paint, we can accomplish that as well. Here we have a surface that has targets that actually will be triggers to trigger the nozzle on and off once it hits those targets. And here we can see that the nozzle is turned on and off when it comes to those targets. Here's another way we can actually use a surface and not as software targets, but rather as a actual obstruction. so that the nozzle is not turned on or off, but simply, is impeded from hitting the manufacturing surface. So we can see here the, lack of paint underneath the obstruction. When we're happy with the results, we can create a robot program or export the program, download it, we select the available task that we need. We set the parameters for the type of robot, in this case a Fanuc. We are created with an LS file, which we can save locally or to the server. Let's see how we can simulate a process such as this called shot painting, which strengthens the surfaces of products using the projection of small ball bearings. First, we need to go into preferences to set the application type under robotics robot surface simulation as shot peening, as well as adjusting the various trajectory sequence of operation names. After creating the shot peen profile, we can access it from the immersive browser by double clicking. We have many options, including the position, calibration, and various settings. We can do. Here we can see the position of the double beams. We have two, nozzles, and we can set the positions up and determine the projection. strength as well as the material. Once the profile has been set up, we can create the surface task, which, enables us to associate the task with a certain tag group and set other parameters. In this shot painting process, we have two tasks running in parallel, including a fixture that revolves the part as well as the robot that moves the shot painting beams. And those can be run in parallel, as we can see here. in the diagram. we can run the task. We can also simulate the shot ping process for an inner diameter, for inner surfaces that need to be strengthened. Here a lance is rotating off of the end of a robot. And in the next situation, the tool at the end of the robot, the shot peen tool will be stationary while the part is being rotated in a moving fixture. So many different options. To simulate polishing surface tasks, we also need to go to preferences and make sure that we're set up with the appropriate application type. The next order of business is to set up the polishing profile, which gives us many different options such as setting the tool, the contact part, the direction and calibrating, various options. Next, we're working on this surface trajectory of the polishing task. And here we can specify the geometry being used, the strategies of the strokes via patterns, the distance between the strokes and set, different characteristics and determine the tool being used. The polishing tool. We can simulate the task, by running it. And here we can see the robot moving into position on the gurney, going ahead to start polish. And we can set different simulation options, such as, Polishing. We can also set it to be in threshold display, which shows the intensity of the removal of the material. Usually in most industrial applications we will have multiple disks on our polishing tool. As we see here, we can set all the geometry and gimbal characteristics, the pressure needed, and set this up in advance of our simulation. Then once we run the simulation, we can see how the removal and the polishing material is applied to the surface and the various same options can be seen. As we see here, we see multiple passes and depending on the position, we see different disks involved.