Symbols facilitate programming of industrial robots

Abstract

In recent years only large scale enterprises have applied industrial robots, but with decreasing prime cost their application is getting more and more interesting for medium sized companies. But the cost of programming is still comparatively high: The huge variety of different manufacturer-dependent and complex offline-programming tools require high-qualified personnel for the whole process of software development. Furthermore most of the text-oriented programming systems lack user-friendly interfaces and the graphic-supported systems with simulation tools and CAD-data interfaces are still too expensive. Due to these reasons, the Institute for Production Automation at the University of Kaiserslautern developed a new offline programming tool for industrial robots, based on the technique of visual programming. The advantages of this technique is already used in a lot of software applications and is offering a good support especially for non-experts. With the help of this tool, called ROBICON, the user is able to design, build and document any robot program in any code, by using graphical symbols. The knowledge of a textual programming language is not necessary anymore.