An architecture for robot application simulation systems and its industry practice

Industrial robots have been widely used in manufacturing plants to handle various jobs such as palletizing, machine tending, and arc welding. Before real commissioning, the entire robot application system needs to be simulated in a virtual system to ensure safety and to improve development efficiency. Due to the requirements on robots to complete various jobs, multiple robot application simulation systems are on demand to satisfy the corresponding simulation requirements. Based on our experiences on developing various simulation systems, we propose an architecture for robot application simulation systems. This paper presents our years of industrial practices with such an architecture. These practices are collected and summarized from the development of several robot application simulation systems in the last five years and have been proved to be effective.