Off-line Programming Industrial Robots Based in the Information Extracted From Neutral Files Generated by the Commercial CAD Tools

Abstract

Actually, the robot programming is still a hard work (Wrn, 1998). Some causes are: difficulty of available equipment reserve to improve it, complex handling, and technologic approach demanded to learn it. This research demonstrates that the manufacturing cell integration can be accelerated, the communication between different platforms of robots can be optimized and costs with specialized people can be reduced. The off-line programming method was created to minimise the integration cell time. But the contemporary off-line programming has not brought significative gains to the manufacture cell integration, also to reduce the robot programmer working hours. The contemporary programming tools to manufacture cells were projected without the necessary abstraction, to generalize the robot programming problem. The available tools present in robot kits, can program and interact only with its platform, files and libraries. The demand grows for a unified tool that interact between different manufacturers solutions, turning easy robot programming to the companies. The development focus creates portable software, capable to write robot programs to different manufacturer's languages. Hence actually, it research is able to extract reference coordinates from a neutral project CAD file, generate motion commands to different robot platforms, through different input interfaces, running over different operating systems. Summarizing the process: ? The points cloud is extracted from a STL file ? The coordinates references are transformed by scaling, translations and rotations matrixes ? The interesting points are selected according the planned task ? The proprietary robot programs are generated ? The program is sent to the robot controller and runs. So, the effective Off-line programming was tested successfully.