Registration between robot and workpiece in virtual environment for off-line programming

Abstract

Robot has been widely used for industrial application in the flexible manufacturing system. The time-consuming teaching process by skilled engineers is inevitable to teach real robot manipulators for generating the robot program and recording locations which the robot should follow for the given task. The off-line programming (OLP) method is proposed to generate the robot program from CAD format data without the teaching process. It needs a registration process to find the translational and rotational relations between the reference frame of real robot and the reference frame in CAD format data. This paper presents the simple registration method between real robot and workpiece in virtual environment. Also a method to assign position and orientation of TCP (Tool Center Point) in real robot is presented when the target point is selected in the virtual environment by the user. The proposed methods are evaluated by the simulation with the commercial industrial robot for placing tool on the surface of the workpiece which is given in STL format data.