Intuitive skill-level programming of industrial handling tasks on a mobile manipulator

In order for manufacturing companies to remain competitive while also offering a high degree of customization for the customers, flexible robots that can be rapidly reprogrammed to new tasks need to be applied in the factories. In this paper we propose a method for the intuitive programming of an industrial mobile robot by combining robot skills, a graphical user interface and human gesture recognition. We give a brief introduction to robot skills as we envision them for intuitive programming, and how they are used in the robot system. We then describe the tracking and gesture recognition, and how the instructor uses the method for programming. We have verified our approach through experiments on several subjects, showing that the system is generally easy to use even for inexperienced users. Furthermore, the programming time required to program a new task is very short, especially keeping traditional industrial robot programming methods in mind.