Editing and synchronizing multi-robot playback programs

Abstract

Controlling and programming multi-arm robots is cost-intensive and complex. As a result, such systems currently do not play a big role for small and medium sized enterprises. This paper tackles the task of intuitive multi-robot playback programming and introduces a new programming paradigm that allows teaching of both, single arm and multi-arm robots with only little knowledge about robotics. To achieve that, the common playback programming approach is extended to more than one robot and an editing mechanism is added to allow a graphical post processing of the generated trajectories. This editing mechanism contains both, manual editing the trajectories and temporal synchronizing the trajectories of the robots. Additionally, an example on how to use the new programming paradigm is given and also possible scenarios on how to use it and its limits are shown.