An approach to robot off-line programming and simulation for flexible manufacturing systems

This paper presents a new approach for off-line robot program synthesis and simulation system incorporating automatic obstacle avoidance capabilities. The software supports off-line program generation in interactive task encoding and automatic path planning using configuration space (C-space) representation. The work is addressed to the part handling needs of workcells with robot manipulators used in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), where the knowledge about the environment is known. CAD tools are used to create the virtual model of the work environment. Hierarchical object representation provides flexibility in computing configuration obstacle. Feasible path is planned in the free regions of configuration space, collision-free path information is further used to synthesize robot application program in a standard format (IRDATA), and later translated into robot specific program codes. Visual verification of operation is done with animated graphics