Towards Real-Time Interaction with Industrial Robots in the Creative Industries

Abstract

This research provides an overview of the challenges towards realizing interactive (near) real-time control of industrial robots within the context of creative industries. Within this field, there an increasing interest in the use of industrial robots for non-standard fabrication, building upon accessible, flow-based visual programming environments.Where robotics middleware is focused on communication, these software tools focus primarily on computational geometry within design software, with the goal of enabling mass-customization and individualization by linking parametric design with toolpath generation and robot simulation.Realizing interactive processes within such environments is challenging, as they form directed dataflows minimizing opportunities for recursive applications and are limited to non-real-time capable operating systems. A series of realized projects is presented that benefits from the advanced geometrical methods provided by the creative industries’ flow-based programming, while at the same time implementing strategies that enable cyclical dataflows and interaction. Novel software interfaces have allowed for fluent interaction with existing robot technologies, even from non-real-time capable environments.