Agile Visual Programming of a Multi-robot Cyber-Physical System with Operator Interaction

Abstract

This paper presents an improvement of the Visual Programming experience for a multi-robot cyber-physical system used to support an operator in the manufacturing task of assembly and disassembly of injection molds. A Digital Twin of the robotic system is used to run simulations and subsequently control the physical components involved in the work cell, including a human-machine touchscreen interface called Operator Device. Other than improving the simulation with a visual update of the assembly, we introduce the use of ServiceNetworks to simplify the reuse of groups of blocks in the Visual Programming environment. ServiceNetworks can be used to describe complex and repetitive sub-tasks of the assembly, like screwing operations. To support the programming experience, we introduce a new interface to add ServiceNetworks and specify their properties. An experimental demonstration is presented to show the usage of the introduced tools and the derived advantages.