Transformative industrial robot programming in surface manufacturing

Surface manufacturing is a process of adding material to or removing material from the surfaces of a part, where industrial robots are usually used. Robot programming for these applications is still time consuming and costly. Typical teaching methods are not cost effective and efficient. There are many offline programming methods developed to reduce the robot programming effort. However, these methods suffer many practical issues, such as cable/hose tangling, robot configuration, collision and reachability. To solve these problems, this paper discusses a new method to generate robot programs based on existing ones in the database, which contains not only the robot paths, but also the programmers´ knowledge and process parameters. Since industrial robots have been used in production for decades, there are many robot programs for different parts generated by the robot programmers. Some of these parts are quite similar, such as car bodies. Therefore, these robot programs can be transformed to generate new ones with some adjustments based on the geometry of new parts. In this paper, a robot path generation method is developed based on the existing robot paths in the database. Experiments were performed to validate the developed methodology. The results are very promising in reducing the programming efforts in surface manufacturing.