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An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding Xiang Zhang * , Bernd Kuhlenko ¨tter, Klaus Kneupner Department of Assembly and Handling Systems, Leonhard-Euler-Strabe 2, Dortmund University, 44227 Dortmund, Germany Received 9 August 2004; accepted 8 October 2004 Available online 23 November 2004 Abstract Industrial robots are recently introduced to the belt grinding of free-form surfaces to obtain high productive efficiency and constant surface quality. The simulation of belt grinding process can facilitate planning grinding paths and writing robotic programs before manufacturing. In simulation, it is crucial to get the force distribution in the contact area between the workpiece and the elastic contact wheel because the uneven distributed local forces are the main reason to the unequal local removals on the grated surface. The traditional way is to simplify this contact problem as a Signorini contact problem and use the finite element method (FEM) to calculate the force distribution. However, the FEM model is too computationally expensive to meet the real-time requirement. A new model based on support vector regression (SVR) technique is developed in this paper to calculate the force distribution instead of the FEM model. The new model approximates the FEM model with an error smaller than 5%, but executes much faster (1 s vs 15 min by FEM). With this new model, the real-time simulation and even the on-line robot control of grinding processes can be further conducted. q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Belt grinding; Finite element method; Simulation; Support vector regression 1. Introduction Belt grinding is a machining process with a geome- trically indeterminate cutting edge. The grinding belt, which is the cutting tool, consists of coated abrasives and is attached around at least two rotating wheels. The workpiece to be ground is pushed onto one of these wheels which is called contact wheel. Fig. 1 shows the operation of the belt grinding process. The materials are cut off under non-permanent touches between the workpiece and the abrasives. The belt grinding is a variant of the custom grinding processes in that the outer layer of the contact wheel is made of soft materials. The soft contact wheel makes this process very suitable to produce free-form surfaces due to its adaptation to the workpiece surface. The demand for sculptured surfaces originates from both functional and aesthetic requirements. For example, belt grinding with elastic contact wheel is applied practically to the manufacturing of turbine blades, the complexity and quality of whose surface are increasing, and also to the processing of water taps to meet aesthetic demands. Industrial robots are introduced as an automatic manipulator in the grinding process to promote efficiency and quality of products. However, the robot programming is still a laborious task because of the complexity of the workpiece surfaces. Although some off-line programming systems are available, it is still a job highly dependent on the experience of the programmer. In order to further automatize the process, simulation of real-time grinding status becomes necessary. Through the simulation results, grinding path planning as well as robot reaction adjusting can be executed automatically. This paper presents a simulation framework of the free- form surface belt grinding process and a new solution to the Signorini contact problem to accelerate the calculation and to meet the requirement of the real-time simulation. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 will introduce the global grinding model for simple-shaped surfaces and a new- developed local grinding model for free-form surfaces. 0890-6955/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijmachtools.2004.10.006 International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 45 (2005) 641–648 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijmactool * Corresponding author. Tel.: C49 231 755 5624; fax: C49 231 755 5616. E-mail address: [email protected] (X. Zhang).

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Page 1: An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding

An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation

of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding

Xiang Zhang*, Bernd Kuhlenkotter, Klaus Kneupner

Department of Assembly and Handling Systems, Leonhard-Euler-Strabe 2, Dortmund University, 44227 Dortmund, Germany

Received 9 August 2004; accepted 8 October 2004

Available online 23 November 2004

Abstract

Industrial robots are recently introduced to the belt grinding of free-form surfaces to obtain high productive efficiency and constant surface

quality. The simulation of belt grinding process can facilitate planning grinding paths and writing robotic programs before manufacturing. In

simulation, it is crucial to get the force distribution in the contact area between the workpiece and the elastic contact wheel because the

uneven distributed local forces are the main reason to the unequal local removals on the grated surface. The traditional way is to simplify this

contact problem as a Signorini contact problem and use the finite element method (FEM) to calculate the force distribution. However, the

FEM model is too computationally expensive to meet the real-time requirement. A new model based on support vector regression (SVR)

technique is developed in this paper to calculate the force distribution instead of the FEM model. The new model approximates the FEM

model with an error smaller than 5%, but executes much faster (1 s vs 15 min by FEM). With this new model, the real-time simulation and

even the on-line robot control of grinding processes can be further conducted.

q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Belt grinding; Finite element method; Simulation; Support vector regression

1. Introduction

Belt grinding is a machining process with a geome-

trically indeterminate cutting edge. The grinding belt, which

is the cutting tool, consists of coated abrasives and is

attached around at least two rotating wheels. The workpiece

to be ground is pushed onto one of these wheels which is

called contact wheel. Fig. 1 shows the operation of the

belt grinding process. The materials are cut off under

non-permanent touches between the workpiece and the

abrasives. The belt grinding is a variant of the custom

grinding processes in that the outer layer of the contact

wheel is made of soft materials. The soft contact wheel

makes this process very suitable to produce free-form

surfaces due to its adaptation to the workpiece surface. The

demand for sculptured surfaces originates from both

functional and aesthetic requirements. For example, belt

0890-6955/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.ijmachtools.2004.10.006

* Corresponding author. Tel.: C49 231 755 5624; fax: C49 231 755

5616.

E-mail address: [email protected] (X. Zhang).

grinding with elastic contact wheel is applied practically to

the manufacturing of turbine blades, the complexity and

quality of whose surface are increasing, and also to the

processing of water taps to meet aesthetic demands.

Industrial robots are introduced as an automatic manipulator

in the grinding process to promote efficiency and quality of

products. However, the robot programming is still a

laborious task because of the complexity of the workpiece

surfaces. Although some off-line programming systems are

available, it is still a job highly dependent on the experience

of the programmer. In order to further automatize the

process, simulation of real-time grinding status becomes

necessary. Through the simulation results, grinding path

planning as well as robot reaction adjusting can be executed

automatically.

This paper presents a simulation framework of the free-

form surface belt grinding process and a new solution to the

Signorini contact problem to accelerate the calculation and to

meet the requirement of the real-time simulation. This paper

is organized as follows. Section 2 will introduce the global

grinding model for simple-shaped surfaces and a new-

developed local grinding model for free-form surfaces.

International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 45 (2005) 641–648

www.elsevier.com/locate/ijmactool

Page 2: An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding

Fig. 1. Belt grinding process with the elastic contact wheel.

X. Zhang et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 45 (2005) 641–648642

The Signorini contact problem is explained in Section 3.

Section 4 describes the new idea, which is based on the SVR

technology, to solve the Signorini problem and the basic

principle of the SVR. The detailed modelling procedures and

numerical experiments are shown in Sections 5 and 6. The

paper is ended with a conclusion in Section 7.

2. Global grinding model vs local grinding model

The most important step in simulation is to get the

removal from the workpiece surface at discrete time points.

In this context, the simulation of belt grinding processes is

more difficult than such precise operating processes as

milling, because the removal of surface cannot be obtained

directly by CAD data and tool shape. In machining, the

grinding wheel rotates and the belt rubs and strikes the

workpiece surface. Because the shape and distribution of

abrasives on grinding belt is non-uniform and rather

disorderly, the belt grinding process is also considered as

a cutting process with an indeterminate cutting edge. In

addition, the elasticity of the contact wheel causes strong

force variation between the contact wheel and the work-

piece. Thus getting removals is not simply a geometric

computation, but a quite experience-based process.

Fig. 2. Local removal simulati

Several parameters simultaneously effect on the final

global removal of the workpiece surface, for example,

material of the grinding belt, elasticity of the grinding

wheel, temperature and so on. Below is a linear grinding

model by Hammann [1,2]

r Z CAKAkt

Vb

VwlwFA (1)

where r, the material removal rate; CA, the constant decided

by experiments; KA, the combination constant of resistance

factor of the workpiece and grinding factor of the belt; kt,

grinding belt wear factor; Vb, grinding velocity; Vw,

workpiece infeed speed; lw, width of the grinding area;

FA, the acting force between the contact wheel and the part.

The factors in formula (1) are one-valued. A series of

grinding experiments can be executed to get the constant CA

of a particular belt grinding system. Among those factors,

the most important one is the resulting force FA between the

workpiece surface and the elastic contact wheel. Roughly

speaking, the global removal is linearly related to the global

force given that other factors are unvaried.

The global grinding model defined in formula (1) views

the workpiece as a whole and does not consider the statuses

in a local view. Every parameter to be studied in the global

grinding model is quantified by only one value, such as

global force, global removal, etc. The global grinding model

is both applicable to manufacturing of simple-shaped

workpiece surfaces and useful to qualitative study of the

grinding process. But for free-form surface grinding, the

rough linear global relation in Hammann’s model is no

longer adequate specially when a high quality surface is

required. Not only the global removal but also the local

removals from workpiece surface are needed to be known.

To get information in detail, the grinding area at first needs

to be divided into a mesh and then the local situations on

each mesh point need to be defined. For example, the local

forces are represented by the contact forces on all mesh

points in the contact area and the local removals are alike

given by a matrix in which each element indicates

on of free-form surface.

Page 3: An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding

Fig. 3. Signorini contact problem.

X. Zhang et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 45 (2005) 641–648 643

the removal on one mesh point. In this paper, the local

situation is also named distribution. For instance, the force

distribution means the local forces on the mesh points in the

grinding area.

The local removals or removal distribution of the

workpiece surface result from local situations by contact.

Fig. 2 illustrates the local removals simulation. Firstly, the

force distribution is calculated according to the contact

situation defined by the geometric information of both the

workpiece and the contact wheel. Then, the calculated force

distribution is combined with other grinding parameters to

solve the local removals on the free-form workpiece surface.

Achieving local forces is the most time-consuming step

in the belt grinding simulation flow. It is normally regarded

as a Signorini contact problem and solved by the help of

the FEM.

3. Signorini contact problem

A contact problem between an elastic body and a rigid

body was first carefully studied by Signorini. The left part of

Fig. 3 shows a typical Signorini contact situation. F is the

boundary of the elastic body, FF is the area, where the

external forces p are imposed; FD is the fixed area that

cannot be moved and deformed and FC is the contact area.

g is the interval between the elastic body and the rigid body,

i.e. relative position of two objects. If the rigid body is

translated towards the soft body, the soft body will be

deformed according to the geometry of the rigid body (see

right part of Fig. 3). The deformation of the soft body is

indicated by the strain u. Assume that the both bodies do not

penetrate into each other, then the following initial

boundary conditions

vu

vnðu KgÞ Z 0 on FC

u Z 0 on FD

8<: (2)

together with force balance equation

Ku Cp Z 0 on F (3)

hold, where the n is the normal direction vector and K is the

stiffness factor of the elastic body. Besides Eqs. (2) and (3),

the energy minimization principle must be resorted to solve

the elastic deformation u. The elastic body deforms in a way

that tends to minimize its strain potential energy when in

contact with the rigid body, requiring that the conditions (2)

and (3) are satisfied at the same time. The total energy of the

elastic body can be written as

J Z1

2aðu; uÞK f ðuÞ (4)

in which the first item is the potential deformation energy

and the second item f(u) is the energy derived by external

forces. The traditional FEM provides a numerical solution

to the Signorini contact problem. It discretizes the elastic

body into some small elements whose strain are vi. Then the

energy description (4) is rewritten as the discrete element

form

Je ZX

i

1

2vT

i Avi KpT ðviÞ

� �(5)

where A indicates the elasticity field. The numerical solution

is actually to minimize the overall energy (5) subject to

the contact boundary conditions (2) and force balance

condition (3).

Solving this optimization problem is very computation-

ally expensive since a compact mesh is required to ensure the

calculating precision. Blum [3,4] and Suttmeier [5] worked

out a FEM model that considers this contact problem as a

Signorini contact problem. Although having adopted an

optimized mesh discretization strategy [3], it still requires

about 15 min for the calculation of one contact situation. This

is far away from the demand for the real-time simulation of

belt grinding processes, not to mention adjusting the robot’s

Page 4: An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding

X. Zhang et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 45 (2005) 641–648644

reaction in time. The calculating of the force distribution

becomes a bottleneck in the real-time simulation flow.

4. A new method for solving the Signorini

contact problem

Two branches are under research nowadays in order to

accelerate the calculation. The first branch is to optimize the

mesh division; the other is to improve the convergent rate

and stability of optimization algorithms. Both cannot avert

the iteration steps each time when a new contact situation is

given. To overcome this, a learning machine is introduced to

approximate the well-established FEM model in this paper.

Even though an optimization process is also necessary in the

training phase, it can finish the calculation of one contact

situation in a very short time because the time-consuming

transaction is put into the training phrase, not in the run time

any more.

The support vector machine (SVM) [6], an efficient

regression method, is adopted as the learning machine in

this paper. The SVM was firstly invented to deal with the

classification problems and applied successfully in an OCR

(optical character recognition) project by AT & T

Laboratory. After that, it was also extended to solve

regression and prediction problems. So far, the SVM is

successfully applied in both classification applications

(SVC) [7–10] and regression problems (SVR) [11,12].

The results of these projects show that SVM is quite

competitive compared to other existing methods, for

instance, Neural Network.

4.1. Setting of regression problem

Consider approximating the following data set:

ðx1; y1Þ; ðx2; y2Þ;.; ðxn; ynÞ|fflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflffl{zfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflfflffl}n

(6)

xn 3Rl and yn 3R, where l is the dimension of the input

xi and the output yi is a scalar The regression function takes

the form

f ðx;aÞ a2L

where L is the parameter space. The goal of the regression is

to find a function f(x,a0) that minimizes the risk function

Rðf Þ ZXn

iZ1

Cðyi; f ðxiÞÞCcjjf jj2R (7)

where C is the cost function or the loss function. The first

item in Eq. (7) indicates the total penalty imposed on output

errors, jjf jj2R is the regularization item of the result or the

smoothness of the regression function f. c is the tradeoff

factor between two items. The introduction of regularization

item into the risk function aims to enhance the

model’s resistance to the noisy input and to improve the

generalization of the regression function. Different

regression methods differ mainly in two aspects. One is

how to formulate the risk function R(f); the other is how to

find an effective numerical algorithm to get a0.

4.2. Support vector regression

Nonlinear SVR function takes the form

f ðxÞ Z w$FðxÞCb with F : Rl 1F; w2F (8)

where w is a vector, b is a bias scalar and F is the feature

space that normally has a higher dimension than the input

dimension l. F defines how the input x is transformed from

the input space to the feature space. The main idea of

nonlinearity is to map the vectors from the input space to the

feature space F and then apply the linear SVR in this feature

space. When the input space equals the feature space the

SVR is degraded to the linear case.

The SVR uses a new cost function, the 3-insensitive

cost function, to evaluate the discrepancy between

the observation y and the prediction f(x), which has the form

C3ðy; f ðxÞÞ Z jy K f ðxÞj3

Z0 if jy K f ðxÞj%3

jy K f ðxÞjK3 otherwise

((9)

where 3 is defined by user. The 3-insensitive cost function

has its physical meaning that no cost will be imposed if the

difference is smaller than a given value 3. When the value

of 3 is decreased to zero the 3-insensitive cost function

turns out to be the traditional Laplacian cost function. The

specific risk function of the SVR can be written as the

form

Rsvrðf Þ ZXn

iZ1

ðjy K f ðxÞj3ÞCcjjwjj2 (10)

Therefore, the learning process of the SVR is to find the

values w, b that minimize the Rsvr(f) in formula (10).

Thanks to the 3-insensitive cost function, it is not necessary

to get the w explicitly because w can implicitly expressed

by some of the input vectors xi that are called support

vectors [6,13].

The optimization problem (10) can be transformed to

another mathematical form—Dual Formulation that makes it

not necessary to assign the mapping rule F explicitly but just

needs to select a general kernel function instead. From users’

point of view, the kernel function, the 3 value and the tradeoff

factor c should be selected before training the model.

5. Contact modelling using SVR

The input of the FEM model is the initial contact

situation g in formula (2) and Fig. 3; The output is the local

Page 5: An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding

Fig. 4. Basic assumption.

Fig. 5. Part point selection.

X. Zhang et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 45 (2005) 641–648 645

force distribution. In this work, an uniform discrete form is

used to describe the local initial contact situation, force

distribution and the final local removals. The grinding area

is firstly divided into a mesh with even intervals. The values,

such as g, forces or removals, on mesh points reproduce the

real local conditions approximately. The mesh interval is a

control factor of the precision. The smaller the interval, the

higher is the precision. In our project, the contact area is

limited to a 50!50 mm2 square area and the mesh is evenly

spaced with 1 mm interval. Both local contacts and local

forces are represented by a 50!50 matrix. The FEM model

plays a role that transforms the local contacts matrix g to a

local removal matrix F in a nonlinear way. The SVR is

employed to find such a nonlinear transform by learning the

calculation results of the ‘slow’ FEM model.

Unfortunately, it is not plausible to take the whole local

contact situation, i.e. the 50!50 matrix, as the input of the

SVR. Good results or generalization with such a high input

space dimension cannot be expected because of the curse of

the dimensionality [14,15]. Therefore, we use a data

presentation strategy that is based on a local assumption.

The force on one mesh point is affected only by contact

situation of its surrounding mesh points inside a finite

size area.

The force at one contact point is a function of initial

contact conditions of its surrounding points inside an area

named function area. This is illustrated in the Fig. 4. The left

part is the local contacts in which different colors indicate

different values and right part is the local forces shown in

the same manner. The area enclosed by a black square is the

function area of the mesh point P, whose force is to be

calculated. Obviously, if the function area is large enough or

is the whole contact area, the assumption is undoubtedly

correct.

In this way, the input dimension of the SVR model equals

to the square of the function area size. A big enough

function area would be a guarantee of correctness of the

basic assumption above. However, a big function area will

also cause a high dimension of the input. Through training

experiments, 11 mm is a reasonable size of the function

area. So the input dimension of the SVR model is 121 and

the output is a force value. Each contact mesh point

generates one input/output pair to train the SVR model.

In addition, part point selection (PPS) is used to reduce

the data redundancy in the input vector and further decrease

the input dimension. The PPS, as its name implies, takes

only part of mesh points in the function area instead of all

points as the input of the SVR model with preference.

Page 6: An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding

Table 1

Experiments result of one model

Training pairs 3 c g nSV Mean Simu.

Err (%)

5160 0.04 1 0.4 540 8.56

5160 (PPS) 0.04 1 2 606 8.84

6880 0.04 2 0.6 887 7.71

6880 (PPS) 0.04 1 0.6 675 6.51

10,264 0.04 1 0.6 933 8.23

X. Zhang et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 45 (2005) 641–648646

It lowers the input dimension without losing much

information because the workpiece surface is assumed to

be continuous in every direction and is varied smoothly, not

abruptly. As Fig. 5 shows, only 41 points (solid points on

four black lines) are selected out from all 121 mesh points in

the 11!11 mm2 function area. It will be shown in Section 6

that using PPS does not degrade the performance of the

regression model.

10,264 (PPS) 0.04 1 2 880 8.22

6. Numerical experiments

180 contact situations are defined to generate sufficient

knowledge database to train the SVR and another 64 for

testing. Then FEM model is used to compute the force

distributions accordingly. There are over 100,000 individual

contact mesh points in contact situations for training.

Linear Kernel, Radial Basis Function Kernel (RBF

Kernel), Polynomial Kernel of degree 2 and 3 have been

tried to establish the SVR model. Except that the linear SVR

is apparently incapable of the task, the other three kernels

perform similarly in this application. However, the RBF is

much faster than the polynomial kernels in training

processes. The sigmoid kernel is not included in evaluation

for two reasons. One is that sigmoid kernel does not always

fulfil the Mercer Condition [6], which is a necessary

condition to be a qualified kernel. The other is that the

sigmoid kernel would perform similarly to RBF kernel

when the q is a very small value [16]. Therefore, only the

RBF kernel is considered in the later experiments of

modelling, which takes the form

KRBFðx; yÞ Z eKgjjxKyjj2 (11)

As mentioned above, over 100 thousand training points

are available that are too large to be involved into training at

one time. So varied batch of contact points are selected

randomly to train the SVR model. Below are the proposed

steps to construct the SVR model.

(1)

Fig.

right

Select training data from all available data.

(2)

Determine the 3 in the 3-insensitive cost function of the

SVR and tradeoff factor c in the risk function.

6. One example of simulation results (the left side is the forces calculated by th

side is the error between them).

(3)

e FE

Determine the parameter g in the RBF Kernel.

(4)

Solve the quadratic optimization problem and get

support vectors.

(5)

Change the 3 and parameters and go back to (2) until the

testing error reaches the minimum.

(6)

Select more training data and repeat the above steps.

The training data are generated with and without PPS.

Having been trained, the model is managed to simulate all

the test contact situations. The relative simulation error of

each contact situation is calculated by the formulaPi jFi KF 0

i j

n!max Fi

(12)

where the Fi is the force of one contact point calculated

by FEM model while Fi0 is the result by the SVR model.

Table 1 lists the results of the SVR training and simulation

errors. The mean simulation error in Table 1 is an average

relative simulation error of all testing situations. It is

obvious that PPS does not lower the performance of the

model although it cuts off 2/3 features in the input vector.

Taking more training pairs does not decrease the error any

more when the quantity of training points are already more

than 7000. The best average simulation error of 64 testing

contacts is 6.51%, see Table 1.

Fig. 6 is the simulation result of one contact situation.

The errors occur mainly on the periphery and corner of the

contact area. It can be inferred from figure that the errors are

highly related to the position of the contact point in the

contact area and shape of the contact area itself. The SVR

model may ‘over-learn’ from inner contact points and

‘under-learn’ others because most contact points are inner

M model; the middle is the simulation result of the SVR model and the

Page 7: An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding

Fig. 7. Contact points classification scheme.

Table 3

Experiments result of one model for each kind of points

Point

type

3 c g nSV Relative test-

ing error (%)

1 0.0055 20 0.5 421 3.0

2 0.02 8 0.8 657 4.0

3 0.011 14 1.0 1023 3.0

4 0.02 10 0.8 1081 2.0

5 0.02 8 0.8 659 4.0

6 0.01 20 1.2 657 1.9

7 0.02 10 0.8 1112 2.0

8 0.02 3 1.4 1233 2.8

9 0.011 14 1.0 1027 3.0

10 0.02 10 0.8 1092 1.9

11 0.02 2 1.6 680 2.4

12 0.02 3 0.8 1303 1.8

13 0.02 10 0.8 1119 1.9

14 0.02 3 1.4 1277 2.8

15 0.025 3 0.8 1273 1.8

16 0.03 1 1 1159 2.3

X. Zhang et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 45 (2005) 641–648 647

points. The idea of improvement is to classify the contact

points into some categories and train one SVR model for

each category.

Fig. 7 illustrates the scheme to classify the contact points.

Point P is the contact point to be classified and the area with

gray background is the contact area. A virtual box is drawn

around the point P that has the same size here (can be changed)

as the function area of the point P. Points P1, P2, P3, P4 are

middle points of the four sides of the virtual box. The value of

point Pi takes 1 if the point is inside the contact area or 0

otherwise. Then the value P1P2P3P4C1 is the type No. of the

point P in Tables 2 and 3. For the case in Fig. 7, P1P2P3P4Z0011Z3, so the type No. of point P is P1P2P3P4C1Z4. The

right part of Fig. 7 shows all possibilities of the contact point P.

Thus all contact points can be classified into 24Z16 groups.

Table 2 lists the number of different type of available contact

points for training and testing. The type 16, namely inner

points, has the biggest batch.

There are a few advantages of training one SVR model

for each type of points. First of all, the SVR can

approximate the FEM model with higher precision. Second,

we can get relatively smaller model by classification that

implies a faster calculation. Third, more training pairs can

Table 2

Points statistics

Type Training set Testing set

1 584 56

2 2246 700

3 1764 428

4 5534 2861

5 2246 700

6 1852 172

7 5534 2861

8 9824 4946

9 1764 428

10 5534 2861

11 2596 316

12 11,128 5424

13 5534 2861

14 9824 4946

15 11,128 5424

16 24,976 13,740

Total 102,068 48,724

be involved in the training process to ensure the final

generalization. However, the smoothness of calculation

results by the SVR model will be poor among the adjoining

areas of different type of points. To overcome it, an

overlapping training strategy is adopted. Those points in the

adjoining area of different types are involved in training the

model for all those types. For example, if point P is of type

16, but inside the adjoining area between the type 1 and type

16, then the point P will used to train both models for type 1

and 16. Thus the practical number of training pairs for each

type is more than those listed in Table 2. The virtual box size

is 11 mm with overlapping area 2 mm. Table 3 lists the

training results of 16 kinds of contact points. The final

average simulation error of 64 testing contacts is 4.1%

compared to 6.5% before.

The time required for one contact calculation is about 1 s

on a PC (CPU AMD Athlon 2600, 512 MB memory). The 3 in

Table 3 can be bigger in some degree to reduce the number of

support vectors and hence to accelerate the calculation as

long as the average simulation error is below 5%.

7. Conclusion

This paper demonstrates a local grinding model to

simulate the robot-controlled belt grinding processes,

especially for grinding free-form surfaces. A new force

calculating model is also put forward as an alternative to the

conventional FEM model. Instead of handling the problem in

pure physical way, the new model learns the nonlinear

relation between local contact situation and force distri-

bution. The training experiments show that the approxi-

mation error can be controlled smaller than 5% using the

SVR technology while the time needed for calculation is

reduced from several minutes to about 1 s. This makes the

real-time simulation of the robot-controlled belt grinding

processes possible. As a result, it can facilitate the planning

Page 8: An efficient method for solving the Signorini problem in the simulation of free-form surfaces produced by belt grinding

X. Zhang et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 45 (2005) 641–648648

of the grinding paths beforehand and can even generate

the robot instructions of movement automatically. Finally,

the on-line force control is possibly incorporated into the

simulation system to obtain a high surface quality in the

future work.

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by the Deutsche

Forschungsgemeinschaft(DFG) as a part of the research

group 366 (Simulation Aided Offline Process Design

and Optimization in Manufacturing Sculptured Surfaces).

http://www-isf.maschinenbau.uni-dortmund.de/fgfff/.

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