Intuitive Industrial Robot Programming Interface with Augmented Reality Environment

Abstract

The integration costs of industrial robots into small medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are nowadays one of the main obstacles, to make automated solutions in this sector profitable. An essential role plays the human-robot interface (HRI), which is in robots standard implementation for averagely trained technicians overly complicated and time consuming. A new intuitive HRI, based on augmented reality, is presented to shorten programming phase during in commissioning of robot cells in the production line. The proposed system was implemented on a portable computer with a head-mounted camera and wearable display for the operator. In demonstrative scenery was with the presented hardware setup shown, how basic visualization and simulation functionalities and intuitive programming procedures of industrial robots in the AR environment could be implemented. In addition to the trajectory visualization in an AR environment, the robot’s gripper pose simulation was shown, as it would be visible in operators’ field of view. With the usage of a 6D camera tracked AR-Stylus, combined with the projection of the robots’ gripper 3D model in the AR environment, an elevated level of operator integration into AR environment can be achieved.