Camera based path planning for low quantity - high variant manufacturing with industrial robots

The acquisition costs for industrial robots have been steadily decreasing in past years. Nevertheless, they still face significant drawbacks in the required effort for the preparation of complex robot tasks which causes these systems to be rarely present so far in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) that focus mainly on small volume, high variant manufacturing. In this paper, we propose a camera-based path planning framework that allows the fast preparation and execution of robot tasks in dynamic environments which leads to less planning overhead, fast program generation and reduced cost and hence overcomes the major impediments for the usage of industrial robots for automation in SMEs with focus on low volume and high variant manufacturing. The framework resolves existing problems in different steps. The exact position and orientation of the workpiece are determined from a 3D environment model scanned by an optical sensor. The so retrieved information is used to plan a collision-free path that meets the boundary conditions of the specific robot task. Experiments show the potential and effectiveness of the the framework presented here by evaluating a case study.