Programming of robots based on online computation of their swept volumes

Industrial robots are used widely in factories and a method in which everyone can easily teach their “good” motions is demanded. For this purpose, our group proposed a robot programming method consisting of manual volume sweeping by an operator and automatic motion planning in order to generate motions with short cycle times. A swept volume is the space that robot bodies have passed without collisions, thus we can recognize that the swept volume is free space. In this paper, to reduce a burden of the robot programming we improve our method by calculation of swept volumes, display of them and motion planning totally online during the manual sweeping. Teaching experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Paths generated by all operators had shorter cycle time than teaching/playback by direct teaching, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.