Intuitive industrial robot programming through incremental multimodal language and augmented reality

Developing easy to use, intuitive interfaces is crucial to introduce robotic automation to many small medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Due to their continuously changing product lines, reprogramming costs exceed installation costs by a large margin. In addition, traditional programming methods for industrial robots is too complex for an inexperienced robot programmer, thus external assistance is often needed. In this paper a new incremental multimodal language, which uses augmented reality (AR) environment, is presented. The proposed language architecture makes it possible to manipulate, pick or place the objects in the scene. This approach shifts the focus of industrial robot programming from coordinate based programming paradigm, to object based programming scheme. This makes it possible for non-experts to program the robot in an intuitive way, without going through rigorous training in robot programming.