On the implementation of transferable assembly applications for industrial robots

Current frameworks for vendor-neutral robot programming fall short in transferring real-world manufacturing processes amongst different robot cell configurations. This paper focuses on transferability of robot programming and control frameworks. Our approach features a finite state machine that is used to supervise an underlying iTaSC-based control loop to realize a skill-based, process-oriented programming framework. After the framework's requirements are derived, the specific implementation is elaborated and exemplified with three practical applications (screw driving, snap-fitting, and insertion). The applications are transferred from a Kuka LWR4+ robot to a Kuka KR16-2 industrial robot and to a Universal Robots UR5 lightweight robot.