Teaching of grasp/graspless manipulation for industrial robots by human demonstration

In this paper, we propose a simple teaching method for industrial robots by human demonstration. The method can be divided into two parts: the teaching phase and the planning phase. In the teaching phase, a human operator demonstrates a manipulation of an object, and two cameras recognize the path of the object by observing markers attached on the object. In the planning phase, a motion planner generates a sequence of robot operations to play back the demonstrated path by pick-and-place and pushing. The proposed method incorporates automated camera calibration required for human demonstration, which enables labor-saving teaching and compensates the absolute positional error of industrial robots. In the experiments, each of demonstrated manipulations was reproduced successfully as a combination of pick-and-place and pushing by one or two robot manipulators.