Combining manual haptic path planning of industrial robots with automatic path smoothing

Nowadays, industrial robots are preferably programmed offline, i.e. without interference with the real cell and running production processes. Usually a simulation tool is used to manually define individual locations and to check the created raw path for possible collisions. Within this paper an approach is presented, that combines a haptic input device by means of automated path smoothing. The quality of the generated path can be significantly improved by subsequent automatic filtering. Removing redundant locations or modifying intermediate ones increases the smoothness of the path. The semi-automatic programming paradigm with haptic interaction is expected to lead to an improved workflow for robot offline programming.