Multimodal spectrAl control of laSer processing with cognitivE abilities.

Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) is a promising technique used for direct manufacturing of metallic parts. This near-net-shape (close to the final geometry) technique builds up a part with a coarse geometry (to improve the production rate) through the successive deposition of molten tracks layer-by-layer. This means, metallic parts are built up layer-by-layer overlapping successive laser cladding tracks. A final machining is required to achieve the required dimensions and surface finish.

This novel manufacturing technique allows manufacturing pieces without limitation of size and minimizing material waste. The difficulty to ensure the final properties of the part (e.g. mechanical properties, dimensions), many of them related to deformations caused by the heat input of the laser beam, and the difficulty of programming the necessary paths to manufacture layer-by-layer the piece are main limitations of this technique.

In this sense, it is necessary to develop new systems able to guarantee the quality and accuracy of parts, without decreasing productivity. MAShES is developing a full multimodal solution able to overcome these limitations through a full monitoring and control solution for LMD. This solution is going to detect and correct defects and distortions to guarantee the part quality.

Current solution presents two coaxial image sensors, a CMOS sensor from IDS and a high-speed uncooled MWIR camera sensor from NIT Europe, for on-line process monitoring. Moreover an off-axis triangulation solution based on a red laser stripe and another IDS camera is used for geometrical monitoring.

This meta-package contains four packages:

• mashes_workcell: contains the working cell description files.
• mashes_ueye: contains the modules required for NIR coaxial monitoring.
• mashes_tachyon: contains the modules required for SWIR/MWIR coaxial monitoring.
• mashes_measures: contains modules to calculate geometrical measures from NIR images.

To play a bag file with the simultaneous recorded data:

roslaunch mashes_workcell mashes_bagplay.launch filename:=data.bag

where data.bag is the absolute file path.

This work is been supported by the European Commission through the research project "Multimodal spectrAl control of laSer processing with cognitivE abilities (MAShES)", H2020-FoF-2014 - Grant Agreement Nº 637081.

http://www.mashesproject.eu/