User-friendly task level programming based on an online walk-through teaching approach

Purpose – This paper aims to propose a new technique for programming robotized machining tasks based on intuitive human–machine interaction. This will enable operators to create robot programs for small-batch production in a fast and easy way, reducing the required time to accomplish the programming tasks. Design/methodology/approach – This technique makes use of online walk-through path guidance using an external force/torque sensor, and simple and intuitive visual programming, by a demonstration method and symbolic task-level programming. Findings – Thanks to this technique, the operator can easily program robots without learning every robot-specific language and can design new tasks for industrial robots based on manual guidance. Originality/value – The main contribution of the paper is a new procedure to program machining tasks based on manual guidance (walk-through teaching method) and user-friendly visual programming. Up to now, the acquisition of paths and the task programming were done in separate steps and in separate machines. The authors propose a procedure for using a tablet as the only user interface to acquire paths and to make a program to use this path for machining tasks. </jats:sec

Task level robot programming: Background, methods and current state

The thesis is a literature review on task level robot programming. It has been researched from various point of views, starting from the history of robot programming in general to find the underlying motivations for more intuitive and abstract robot programming, which is followed by the methods and general structure of a task level programming environment. A survey on the state of the art is also presented in this paper, where currently available commercial robot programming systems and studies in literature are reviewed. Task level robot programming makes robot programming more intuitive, faster and requires no programming expertise if done correctly. Small to medium sized enterprises with small batch sizes, frequently changing products and possibly underqualified staff with regard to programming skills would benefit most from intuitive human-robot interfaces by being enabled to access the production efficiency of robotics without programming expertise. Currently there are few commercial process specific robot programming systems, where robot programming is automatic and the user inputs only a task specification. Addition to the commercial systems, task level programming and intuitive human-machine interfaces such as multimodal-interaction or teaching by demonstration are emerging research topics