In Toyota, a robot off-line programming system was developed five years ago for the use at spot welding processes. And it has been effective to reduce and level off the engineering time. This time we have developed the new robot simulation system. It has three newly features so that the system becomes capable of simulating and programming robots from various manufacturers with different functions. As a result, the new system can be applied to a variety of processes in automobile manufacturing.First, a universal robot programming language was developed which includes a variety of commands such as definitions of motion attributes, signals of inputs/outputs, control of program flow, special functions proper to each process, and so on. And the language can be translated to and from any particular programming language using pre / post processor, so the simulation system needs to deal with only one language. Second, a universal inverse-kinematics transformation algorithm was developed which is able to transform the coordinates with respect to the world coordinate system to the joint angles of robots of any mechanical configurations. Therefore, it is no longer required to develop special inverse-kinematics transformation module for each robot structure. Third, a parameter table was developed in which dimensions of robot arms and mechanical configurations are defined. The configurations of the specific robot can be easily assigned by only setting the value of each item in this table.As a result, we can use the system for various manufacturing processes such as spray painting, arc welding, material handling, and assembly. And engineering and programming time for those robotic systems is significantly reduced and its fluctuation is leveled off.
Development of a Robot Simulation and Off-Line Programming System
Sae Technical Papers
Passenger Car Conference & Exposition ; 1992
1992-09-01
Conference paper
English
Automotive engineering | 1989
|Robot programming language functionality for use in off-line programming
Automotive engineering | 1989
|