Object level programming of industrial robots

We present a system designed for object level programming of industrial robots. It contains essentially four modules : - a C.A.D. module to build geometric models of objects and manipulators and define the implantation of the robotic cell. - a pre-processing module which uses the cell model to compute a representation of the free-space in the joint space of the robot arm. - an obstacle avoidance module which uses this representation to perform different tasks such as testing or searching a safe trajectory. - a planning module that combines the elementary tasks of the obstacle avoidance module to get the environment from its current state to the state defined by an object level instruction. It can be used either during the conception step of a robotic cell or for programming fastly and safely an industrial robot.