Skill-Based Easy Programming Interface for Industrial Applications

This paper presents a framework that uses robot skills as a building blocks to ease robot programming. The presented framework is geared towards industrial usage and attempts to lower the technological barrier for workers to not just operate the robots on their factory floor but also to program them. By lowering the technological complexity of programming robots in a vendor-independent fashion, it becomes possible for companies with a need to reprogram robots frequently to automate their operations.The presented framework is built on top of a ROS2 middleware and uses 3-layered architecture to provide reusable skills that are easy to parameterize leveraging the capabilities of modern collaborative robots as well as on traditional industrial robots. The proposed framework further provides a Human-Machine Interface and a database so that the composed skills can be orchestrated and parameterized for a given application in a user-friendly way.The proposed framework’s efficacy in a production environment is demonstrated by three experiments followed by the results with a strong case for the industrial utilization of the approach by quantifying its temporal and economical benefits. Lastly, the paper ends with a discussion on the results and conclusions on the use of this framework and the advantages it can bring to the industry.