Performance Characteristic Analysis of Automated Robot Spray Painting Using Taguchi Method and Gray Relational Analysis

This study investigates the performance characteristics of an industrial robot ABB-IRB1410 for an automated painting process using Taguchi orthogonal array (OA) and gray relational analysis (GRA) and compared with the manual painting method using HVLP gun. The multi-response process is converted into single objective and optimized using GRA. The method established in this study combines both OA and GRA. The experiment is designed using Taguchi's L9 OA. The foremost objective of this experiment is to identify the control parameters for the improved quality of paint coating measured in terms of thickness variation, surface roughness and film adhesion. In addition to that analysis of variance and regression analysis are carried out to find the influencing parameters on each response variables individually and to build the mathematical model, respectively. Also the GRA result is compared with the optimized value determined by the exhaustive search method.