FlexRoP – flexible, assistive robots for customized production

Abstract

Flexible production assistants of the future are required to be skillful, universally applicable, safe and easy to program. State of the art robot systems that are intended to be used for human robot collaboration require in some cases unintuitive text based programming, and remain, especially in combination with peripheral hardware like external sensors or machine vision algorithms, complicated. The FlexRoP project tries to overcome current limitations by development and usage of a flexible skill-based robot programming middleware and improved user interface technologies. This paper introduces usecases, the intended system architecture, methodology for description and training of kinesthetic skills as well as first application results and intentions for future developments.