To improve polishing quality and cope with the shortage of skilled workers for aluminum wheel-hub surface polishing, an automatic surface polishing system with hierarchical control based on the teaching-playback method was presented. Multi-axis cutter location data (CL data) were generated with the teaching method. First, a helical tool path and a flexible polishing tool were adopted to achieve high quality and high efficiency; next, the initial irregular data were processed into continuous polishing CL data. The important factor affecting polishing quality, namely the interpolation cycle in the multi-axis CL data was calculated based on a constant removal rate. Results from polishing experiments show that the quality of automatic machine polishing is better and stabler than manual polishing.
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