Transformative CAD based industrial robot program generation

Industrial robots are widely used in various processes of surface manufacturing, such as spray painting, spray forming, rapid tooling, spray coating, and polishing. Robot programming for these applications is still time consuming and costly. Typical teaching methods are not cost effective and efficient. There are many off-line programming methods developed to reduce the robot programming effort. However, these methods suffer many practical issues, such as cable/hose tangling, robot configuration, collision, and reachability. To solve these problems, this paper discusses a new method to generate robot programs. Since industrial robots have been used in production for decades, there are many robot programs for different parts generated by the robot programmers. These robot programs, which contain not only the robot paths, but also the programmers’ knowledge and process parameters, can be transformed to generate new robot programs for similar parts. In this paper, a transformative robot program generation method is developed based on the existing ones in the database. Experiments were performed to validate the developed methodology. The results are very promising in reducing the programming efforts in surface manufacturing. & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.