A system to automate the generation of program variants for industrial robot applications

This paper presents a novel system that allows us to generate variants of industrial robot programs. Such a system is widely needed in different areas of application. First, product scenarios change often slightly and thereby cause high programming costs. Using our system reduces these costs, because nonspecialists can create a specific program variant by themselves. Second, an engineer needs numerous program variants to find an optimized cell layout, e.g. regarding robot execution time. Present systems require too much manual effort and are very limited in considering application-specific requirements. Consequently, we have implemented a system that contains an interpreter to execute user-defined scripts. A script contains the information on how to generate the program variants. Each change of the parameter values inside the script results in a different program. We simulate the program execution and use the simulation results to further improve the programs. We prove the usefulness of our system by industrial applications.