User oriented integration of sensor operations in a offline programming system for welding robots

The use of sensors in industrial welding productions shall be undoubtedly advantageous to enhance the quality, flexibility and efficiency of robots. However sensors are only integrated in a small number of applications. An essential reason is the difficulty to generate robot programs for sensor operations. In this paper a new method for off-line programming of sensor operations is described. The developed module has been integrated in a PC-based off-line programming system (called PIN). Its user-friendly design enables fast and easy programming of sensor operations assisted by icon-oriented user interface and task-sorted macro library. In spite of running on a PC (low-cost system), a high performance is offered by the presented system which was developed for the use of nonprogramming specialists