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Examines the results of a questionnaire‐based survey on the use of teach pendants with industrial robots. The main aims of the survey were to ascertain the following: extent of use of teach pendants with industrial robots; methods of robot programming used; possible difficulties of using teach pendants; and the future for teach pendants. Outlines the structure of the survey and evaluates the results from the questionnaire. Concludes that teach pendants are still one of the principal means of programming a robot and that difficulties controlling the motion of robots with teach pendants need to be addressed.

Most industrial robots are still programmed using the typical teaching process, through the use of the robot teach pendant. This is a tedious and time‐consuming task that requires some technical expertise, and hence new approaches to robot programming are required. The purpose of this paper is to present a robotic system that allows users to instruct and program a robot with a high‐level of abstraction from the robot language.

The paper presents in detail a robotic system that allows users, especially non‐expert programmers, to instruct and program a robot just showing it what it should do, in an intuitive way. This is done using the two most natural human interfaces (gestures and speech), a force control system and several code generation techniques. Special attention will be given to the recognition of gestures, where the data extracted from a motion sensor (three‐axis accelerometer) embedded in the Wii remote controller was used to capture human hand behaviours. Gestures (dynamic hand positions) as well as manual postures (static hand positions) are recognized using a statistical approach and artificial neural networks.

It is shown that the robotic system presented is suitable to enable users without programming expertise to rapidly create robot programs. The experimental tests showed that the developed system can be customized for different users and robotic platforms.

The proposed system is tested on two different robotic platforms. Since the options adopted are mainly based on standards, it can be implemented with other robot controllers without significant changes. Future work will focus on improving the recognition rate of gestures and continuous gesture recognition.

The key contribution of this paper is that it offers a practical method to program robots by means of gestures and speech, improving work efficiency and saving time.

This paper presents an alternative to the typical robot teaching process, extending the concept of human‐robot interaction and co‐worker scenario. Since most companies do not have engineering resources to make changes or add new functionalities to their robotic manufacturing systems, this system constitutes a major advantage for small‐ to medium‐sized enterprises.

Flexible feeding is an emerging alternative to traditional part feeding methods. This alternative greatly enhances the versatility of a manufacturing workcell by using a robot manipulator and sophisticated sensing devices such as machine vision, thereby significantly reducing both cost and set up time. This article explores the benefits of a new model in PC‐based robot control, which makes the development of flexible feeders and similar applications much easier than using traditional robot programming environments. It also explores how a programming paradigm based on a well‐defined model of the workcell greatly simplifies both the logic of the application and the calibration of the physical machine.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case‐based system for offline automatic programming in robotic assembly production. This system can reuse past learned robot programs to generate programs for new assembly tasks.

The approach used in this paper is case‐based reasoning. The assembly knowledge acquired from the robot program for an assembly task is retained in a case, which is composed of the primitive task description and the corresponding robot program schema. The retained cases are retrieved by matching features of their primitive task descriptions, and are reused to automatically program for new tasks by instantiating their robot program schemata.

A case not only can be reused as a whole, but also can be reused partly by synthesizing different parts of several cases to generate a program for a new task in a variant environment.

The teaching time of robots can be greatly reduced. This helps to introduce robots into small and medium enterprises.

This paper proposes a novel system that can automatically program for assembly tasks in various environments by flexibly reusing past robot programs.

A successful flotation on the Vienna stockmarket is providing IGM with the financial muscle to develop its robot welding operation. David West, managing director of its UK subsidiary, talks to Brian Rooks.

Driven by the Department of Energy's (DOE) expected 30‐year clean‐up of its nuclear weapons complex, a research team, co‐ordinated from Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, has built an automated environmental laboratory.

The purpose of this paper is to design a practical direct teaching method for the industrial robot with large friction resistance and gravity torque but without expensive force/torque sensor, where the gravity torque is just a function of joints position, whereas the friction is closely associated with joint velocity, temperature and load.

In the teaching method, the output torque of joint motor is controlled through current to compensate gravity torque completely and friction resistance incompletely. Three variables closely associated with friction are investigated separately by experiment and theoretical analysis, and then a comprehensive friction model which is used to calculate the required compensated friction torque is proposed. Finally, a SIASUN 7 degrees of freedom robot was used to verify the model and the method.

Experimental results demonstrated that the teaching method enables an operator to teach the robot in joint space by applying small force and torque on either end-effector or its body. The friction investigation suggests that the velocity and temperature have a strong nonlinear influence on viscous friction, whereas load torque significantly influences the Coulomb friction linearly and causes a slight Stribeck effect.

The main contribution includes the following: a practical joint space direct teaching method for a common industrial robot is developed, and a friction model capturing velocity, temperature and load for robot joints equipped with commercialized motors and harmonic drives is proposed.

A new application for the industrial robot has emerged, inspection, with two players emerging, Stäubli and Amatec Robotics of the Kuka Roboter Group. Both companies’ systems and their competing benefits are discussed. Until this new development, car bodies were inspected on‐line with arrays of laser sensors fixed in position over the production line. Using a robot to manipulate the same type of sensor gives more flexibility in the areas of the car to be measured and also reduces the number of sensors needed. It emerges that virtually all of the applications to date are to be found in European car plants, and some of these are described.

This paper addresses some aspects related to Flexible Manufacturing Cell (FMC) programming, and is based on two previously published papers and focuses more on application details. Recognising that one of the major problems of today’s Flexible Manufacturing Cells is the diversity of languages and hardware architectures present in the same FMC, we introduce an object‐oriented and distributed software architecture that can be used for FMC programming and monitoring. Application examples of an industrial FMC and an R&D/education setup are presented, in which we used an industrial robot and a force/torque/acceleration sensor. In the process some implementation details are presented and discussed.