Integration of haptic interaction and automated path planning for robot offline programming

摘要

Nowadays, industrial robots are an indispensable part of production. They are preferably programmed offline, I.e. without interference with the real cell and running production processes. State of the art in offline programming is to use a simulation tool to manually define individual locations and to check the created raw path for possible collisions subsequently. Additionally, a number of algorithms have been developed that allow finding a path automatically. Although these algorithms work well for simple tasks, automated task level programming is still far from its industrial breakthrough for complex robot cells. Within this paper an approach is presented, that combines a haptic input device with means of automated task planning to smooth and realign the manually defined raw path. The quality of the resulting path can be improved by subsequent automatic filtering. Removing redundant locations or modifying intermediate ones can increase the smoothness of the path. The objective is to achieve an industrially applicable concept, which is superior to current solutions in terms of time for programming and ergonomics. The semiautomatic programming paradigm with haptic interaction is expected to lead to an improved workflow for robot offline programming.