Outline Font Handler for Industrial Robots

Industrial robots have been applied to various industrial fields during this four decades, however, it seems that low-cost CAD/CAM interface has not been permeated to robots' users yet. In this paper, an outline font handler is proposed for three types of industrial robots to cope with this problem. Without conventional teaching process and other specialized tools, the handler can produce desired trajectories called CLS (Cutter Location Source) data from outline fonts based on a spline interpolation approach, so that a promising CAD/CAM interface between commercially-provided industrial robots and widely-used design tools such as Illustrator and Photoshop is established. The usefulness and effectiveness are evaluated through simulations and actual drawing, engraving experiments of outline fonts using industrial robots FANUC R2000iC, DENSO VS068 and an engineering education robot DOBOT.