Efficient solutions for programming and safe monitoring of an industrial robot via a virtual cell

In the short- and mid-term visions for robotics development, robots are expected to be used also in small and medium-sized companies, sharing spaces with different manufacturing cycles and possibly with human operators. This objective can be fulfilled only assuring high flexibility in production control, safety for workers and for machinery, and interfaces that allow an easy use of the equipment. The development of a proper hardware/software architecture for robot motion planning and on-line safe monitoring is a fundamental step, which requires the solution of various problems, both from the theoretical and the practical point of view. A hardware/software architecture has been developed using Microsoft Robotics Developers Studio and implemented for a six-dof COMAU NS 12 robot, allowing in particular to dynamically constrain the robot motion, and to supervise it on-line. This paper develops (i) a fast and efficient procedure to perform iterative inverse kinematics, in order to achieve full programming capabilities in the Cartesian space, and (ii) safety solutions that avoid the robot to enter the off-limits regions of the workspace, considering the delays between the motion of the real robot and its replica in the virtual cell.