A Graphical User Interface for the Initial Path Generation of a Robotic Manipulator for an Arc Welding System

In this paper a novel, graphical user interface, is presented. This interface can be used to generate a desired path of the end effector of a robotic manipulator. The path is selected by a static scene of the robot environment, manually either on line using an image capturing system or off line using a stored pair of images or a complex image. On line the system captures a pair of images using a stereovision system with one or two cameras or our pseudo stereovision system. A desired path could be generated by an edge or part of it of the scene image, a line manually designed to the image or a combination of lines of the previous cases. A user can initially process a pair of images selecting from pull down menus a variety of filters, edge detection methods and operations. Then the desired path as a combination of lines is selected from images. Applying our correspondence algorithm, corresponding edges can be found. Finally, a successive number of path points are calculated by means of the stereo system equations, the camera calibration parameters and the hand-eye transformation. In on line operation the capturing system mounted on the end effector can capture images with the desired best view of a scene by moving or rotating, using push buttons, the end effector of the robotic manipulator PUMA 761. Other facilities of the above system are the selection of a variety of colors and shapes, histogram view, magnification, automatic execution of user selected operations and system information. The interface is developed in Visual C++, it runs in a personal computer and communicate with the robot PUMA 761 via ALTER communication port. Key-Words: User interface, path generation, robotic manipulator, image processing, stereovision, facilities.