Developing concepts for improved efficiency of robot work preparation

SInBot[1] is a large research project that focuses on maximizing the efficient use of mobile industrial robots during medium sized production runs. The system that will be described in this paper will focusses on the development and validation of concepts for efficient work preparation for cells of intelligent mobile robots that execute medium sized production runs. For a wide range of products, the machining tasks will be defined on an appropriate level, enabling control over the robots behavior and performance. When the system, system operator, and robots have more experience with a product the system can be controlled on a higher level (i.e. the subsystems or even robots can start allocating and executing tasks by themselves). Different test beds are used to test the diversity of aspects involved in the development of the SInBot system. The initial test bed used for this research is a combination of two Lynxmotion AL5D robots and a Samsung SUR40 multi-touch environment. In this paper, novel work preparation concepts will be described and an experiment setup is proposed to validate the model for definition and generation of tasks from a CAD file. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.