Easy robot path programming concepts: An industrial perspective on path creation

One of the key challenges for industrial robotics is the high level of expertise and effort required to program a robust, production-quality robot system. In most cases, a highly trained specialist is required to setup a system, which drives up the installation costs. It can also be difficult and time consuming even for an expert programmer to manually program long, complex robot paths. This is a major issue in today's manufacturing environment where product lifetime is often measured in months. This paper identifies some of the major difficulties in creating robot programs, focusing primarily on issues related to creating and editing a robot path. Next it describes several recent attempts to simplify industrial robot path programming. This paper then analyzes the applicability, strengths and weakness of various approaches assessing them in light of novice, intermediate and advanced users. Lastly, some recommendations are given for further development in this area of simplifying industrial robot path programming.