Automatic robot path integration using three-dimensional vision and offline programming

In manufacturing industries, offline programming (OLP) platforms provide an independent methodology for robot integration using 3D model simulation away from the actual robot cell and production process, reducing integration time and costs. However, traditional OLP platforms still require prior knowledge of the workpiece position in a predefined environment, which requires complex human operations and specific-purpose designs, highly reducing the autonomy of the systems. The presented approach proposes to overcome these problems by defining a novel automated offline programming system (AOLP), which integrates a flexible and intuitive OLP platform with a state-of-the-art autonomous object pose estimation method, to achieve an environment and model independent platform for automatic robotic manufacturing. The autonomous recognition capabilities of the three-dimensional vision system provide the relative position of the workpiece model in the OLP platform, with robustness against clutter, illumination, and object material. After that, the user-friendly OLP platform allows an efficient and automatic path generation, simulation, robot code generation, and robot execution. The proposed system precision and robustness are analyzed and validated in a real-world environment on four different sets of experiment. Finally, the proposed system’s features are discussed and compared with other available solutions for practical industrial manufacturing, showing the advantages of the proposed approach. Overall, despite sensor resolution limitations, the proposed system shows a remarkable precision and promising direction towards highly efficient and productive manufacturing solutions.