Tool wear in terms of vibration effects in milling medium-density fibreboard with an industrial robot

Machining with robots represents a promising, highly flexible and cost effective alternative to standard machining and hand labour applications when machining mid tolerance soft material end products. One of the most challenging issues is to know the vibration characteristics in milling with the robots which greatly affect tool life. In general the technological bases of tool life expectancy while milling with robot arms are not available or studied. That's why the purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of attained vibrations analysis during the milling process and correlated tool wear. Primarily the study is focused on tool wear according to the distance between the milling position and the robot's base. Results show that increasing distance between the robot's base and the milling position significantly affects tool wear because of the attained vibrations in proportion to the increasing distance respectively. Tool wear has also proved to be greater in comparison to machining with CNC machine and applicable new information for woodworking industry.