  Large demand for robotics and automation has been reflected in the sanding
works, as current manual operations are labor-intensive, without consistent
quality, and also subject to safety and health issues. While several machines
have been developed to automate one or two steps in the sanding works, the
autonomous capability of existing solutions is relatively low, and the human
assistance or supervision is still heavily required in the calibration of
target objects or the planning of robot motion and tasks. This paper presents
the development of an autonomous sanding robot, which is able to perform the
sanding works on an unknown object automatically, without any prior calibration
or human intervention. The developed robot works as follows. First, the target
object is scanned then modeled with the structured-light camera. Second, the
robot motion is planned to cover all the surfaces of the object with an
optimized transition sequence. Third, the robot is controlled to perform the
sanding on the object under the desired impedance model. A prototype of the
sanding robot is fabricated and its performance is validated in the task of
sanding a batch of wooden boxes. With sufficient degrees of freedom (DOFs) and
the module design for the end effector, the developed robot is able to provide
a general solution to the autonomous sanding on many other different objects.
