2D CAD based robot programming for processing metal profiles in short series manufacturing

Fast robot programming is a requirement for efficient, flexible and reconfigurable short series manufacturing processes. This paper presents a model based robot programming concept for applications where metal profiles are processed by robots and only a 2D geometrical representation of the workobject - or product billet - is available. The robot is programmed mainly through the 2D CAD drawing of the product billet by adding the process-related information such as bending- and cutting lines, angles and plate thickness. This enables the automatic extension of the model into 3D-space and calculating the sparse set of tool path tag points for the robot. The concept also considers the joint limits of the robot while interpolating the robot motions to full paths. This is achieved by dividing the complete path into segments and adjusting the product billet location and tag point configurations within the path. The segmentation of the path is done in an offline programming environment that also enables collision checking and path correctness verification. The concept is evaluated and tested in a simulation environment and in a real robot testing environment.