A teach pendant to control virtual robots in Roboanalyzer

Abstract

Teach programming is an interactive way to program industrial robots. It involves usage of a handheld control unit called teach pendant that can be used to control the motion of a robot. It provides a very convenient method to teach trajectories to the robot. One of the advantages of teach pendant programming is that an operator is not required to learn any special programming language. Hence, teach pendants can be used as an effective tool in educational robotics as well. These devices are generally proprietary and work for a specific robot. As few institutes have robots, the teach pendants are not available to a lot of students to use and control robots. In this paper, a generic `teach pendant' has been reported that can be used to control the motion of virtual robots available in RoboAnalyzer, a 3D model based robotics learning software. The teach pendant can be used by students to program virtual robots.