Off-line Programming and Simulation from CAD Drawings: Robot-Assisted Sheet Metal Bending
This addresses the problem of making robot programming more accessible for manufacturing system designers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing CAD and robotics knowledge.
The paper tackled the difficulty of programming industrial robots by developing a CAD-based off-line programming and simulation system, which was tested in a robot-assisted sheet metal bending cell to evaluate its pros and cons.
Increasingly, industrial robots are being used in production systems. This is because they are highly flexible machines and economically competitive with human labor. The problem is that they are difficult to program. Thus, manufacturing system designers are looking for more intuitive ways to program robots, especially using the CAD drawings of the production system they developed. This paper presents an industrial application of a novel CAD-based off-line robot programming (OLP) and simulation system in which the CAD package used for cell design is also used for OLP and robot simulation. Thus, OLP becomes more accessible to anyone with basic knowledge of CAD and robotics. The system was tested in a robot-assisted sheet metal bending cell. Experiments allowed identifying the pros and cons of the proposed solution.