AdaptPack Studio: Automatic Offline Robot Programming Framework for Factory Environments

The brisk and dynamic environment that factories are facing, both as an internal and an external level, requires a collection of handy tools to solve emerging issues in the industry 4.0 context. Part of the common challenges that appear are related to the increasing demand for high adaptability in the organizations' production lines. Mechanical processes are becoming faster and more adjustable to the production diversity in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). Concerning the previous characteristics, future factories can only remain competitive and profitable if they have the ability to quickly adapt all their production resources in response to inconstant market demands. Having previous concerns in focus, this paper presents a fast and adaptative framework for automated cells modeling, simulation and offline robot programming, focused on palletizing operations. Established as an add-on for the Visual Components (VC) 3D manufacturing simulation software, the proposed application allows performing fast layout modeling and automatic offline generation of robot programs. Furthermore, A* based algorithms are used for generating collision-free trajectories, discretized both in the robot joints space and in the Cartesian space. The software evaluation was tested inside the VC simulation world and in the real-world scenario. Results have shown to be concise and accurate, with minor displacement inaccuracies due to differences between the virtual model and the real world.