Easy robot programming for industrial manipulators by manual volume sweeping

In this paper, we propose a robot programming method for industrial manipulators. It enables novice human operators to teach “good” robot motions in a short period of time. First in this method, a human operator makes a robot manipulator sweep a volume by its bodies. The manipulator is equipped with a force sensor on its wrist and damping-controlled; the operator can move it freely by grasping its end-effector. The swept volume stands for a part of the manipulator’s free space, because the manipulator has passed through the volume without collisions. Next, the obtained swept volume is used by a motion planner to generate a well-optimized path of the manipulator automatically. Finally, the planned motion is executed by the manipulator. Even non-skilled operators can generate robot motions with short cycle time by doing the above procedure. The effectiveness of our method is successfully demonstrated in teaching experiments for a comparison with other conventional methods.