Software Overview

Capabilities

• Intuitive composition of complex robot tasks by drag'n'drop of elementary motion types
• Extensive library of generic as well as specialized elementary motion types
• Motion types include diverse aspects as e.g.
  • force-controlled peg-in-hole
  • motion planning of cycle-time optimized, collision free contact-less motions
  • automated planning of fitting parts into a grid
• Intuitively, kinestaetically guiding the robot to parametrize elementary motion types
• The intuitive robot-guiding parametrization automatically serves as task calibration
• Integration of different sensor types to support various sensor-adaptive motions
• Expert editor to build more specialized elementary motion types from more basic ones to speed up reuse
• Modes to simulate working with CAD models while actually working without, as e.g. teaching virtual obstacles
• Possibility to use 3D models for motion planning and optimization when desired
• Option to log sensor data and data of adaptive task execution for process monitoring
• Automatic robot controller program code generation from intermediate, internal task model
• Generated code runs stand-alone — the Programming Suite is not used during robot task execution

Technology

The crucial, unique core of the ArtiMinds Robot Programming Suite is a proprietary, commercial-only enhancement of award-winning research by the founders in the area of robot manipulation task models. This allows to represent an adaptive robot task internally as a graph model, encompassing all geometric, temporal, force and tactile constraints in a sound and robust manner. Based on this model, motion planning and force-feedback control can adaptively execute a task while adhering to all relevant process constraints. In the industrial ArtiMinds Robot Programming Suite, motion planning is typically only performed offline once, to lock down undesirable variations, but feedback-control is performed online. The second unique technology aspect are methods to parametrize the powerful internal model from few, intuitive inputs as e.g. a small number of kinestaetically taught robot poses.

Work flow

In general the workflow can be described as follows: the ArtiMinds Robot Programming Suite is a development tool running on an external computer and interacting with the robot controller during programming. The human interacts directly with the robot by means of the teach pendant or by directly guiding the robot at its wrist to record poses of the robot. The human also interacts with the software on the standard computer to compose complex sequences and teach poses for the generation of adaptive robot motion programs. Subsequently, the Programming Suite automatically generates a comprehensive program in the native robot programming language. This program is then transferred to the robot controller and can be executed stand alone. Thus, both the standard computer and the Programming Suite can be removed for robot task execution.
When adjusting the robot task model later, the standard computer and the Programming Suite can be reconnected, a saved version of the internal task model can be reloaded and aspects to be changed addressed by focussed reparameterization directly at the robot. Thus, adjustments can be performed very quickly, concentrating solely on aspects to be changed. Re-usability between similar tasks is also very high that way.