<title>Design and manufacturing tools for laser beam processing</title>

Abstract

Today's situation with increasingly shorter time-to-market limits and growing variant spectra calls for advanced methods in the manufacturing domain. A big potential for gaining faster and better manufacturing results lies in the application of offline programming, especially if processing small lot sizes. Offline programming offers as main advantage a notable reduction of deadlock times of manufacturing systems. Applying this technology there is no time consumptive teach-in on the robots necessary. A technology module based on CAD/CAM technique--mainly for 3D welding applications--is described which permits to carry out offline path and process planning including simulation and visualization of the processing task.