Variation of components by automated driving

Driving as an incremental forming method can be carried out on driving machines. The copied driving process has been developed based on this manual manufacturing method. The process allows the reproduction of identical components using manual manipulations performed by the worker on the driving machine, the so-called manufacturing strategies. For this, the manufacturing strategy is tracked during the manual driving process and can thus be repeated accurately by robot handling to ensure reproducibility. Since manufacturing strategies can be made available for hand-crafted components, in this paper, for a sample component we demonstrate how this process information can be utilised to derive geometric variations of the sheet metal part in the sense of scaling. For this purpose, the necessary procedures are presented which apply an existing component geometry and the associated manufacturing strategy. An analytical characterisation of the manufacturing strategy and a functional description of the relation between sheet blank geometry before deformation and manufacturing strategy are deduced. This allows control of process parameters to vary the strategy and hence enables a variation of component geometry that is finally subject to validation and verification.