Converting Robot Offline Programs to Native Code Using the AdaptPack Studio Translators

Abstract

The increase in productivity is a demand for modern industries that need to be competitive in the actual business scenario. To face these challenges, companies are increasingly using robotic systems for end-of-line production tasks, such as wrapping and palletizing, as a mean to enhance the production line efficiency and products traceability, allowing human operators to be moved to more added value operations. Despite this increasing use of robotic systems, these equipments still present some inconveniences regarding the programming procedure, as the time required for its execution does not meet the current industrial needs. To face this drawback, offline robot programming methods are gaining great visibility, as their flexibility and programming speed allows companies to face the need of successive changes in the production line set-up. However, even with a great number of robots and simulators that are available in market, the efforts to support several robot brands in one software did not reach the needs of engineers. Therefore, this paper proposes a translation library named AdaptPack Studio Translator, which is capable to export proprietary codes for the ABB, Fanuc, Kuka, and Yaskawa robot brands, after their offline programming has been performed in the Visual Components software. The results presented in this paper are evaluated in simulated and real scenarios.

AdaptPack Studio: an automated intelligent framework for offline factory programming

“…The PLC allows the robot to pick products only if the picking conveyor has products ready to be picked. In Figure 9 is presented a snippet of the auto generated robot routine, after passing through the “Translation” module (Souza et al , 2019). This figure depicts the Program Editor window, where the Main method and subroutines are declared.…”

“…For the translation process the "Translation" module conducted the main process. The approach used a different GUI, responsible for receiving the auto programmed code and translating to the proprietary languages, being this process described in detail in Souza et al (2019) (a video illustrating this process can be found at http://bit.ly/2PJfzgh).…”

AdaptPack studio translator: translating offline programming to real palletizing robots

“…Since Inform is a low-level language [more detailed description in Souza et al (2019)] and some statements of the VC software are not in conformity with it, this translator works according to a different process. It generates at least three files: one file with the extension ".JBI" for the main code, another file with the extension ".JBI" for each subroutine (if it exists), and two other files for base and tool frames declaration and definition, both with the ".CND" extension.…”

“…It is worth noting that all routines are transcribed in the same file. The Inline Form Documentation method Figure 8 VC program test (Souza et al, 2019) is also created. Hence, the KRL code instructions are exposed in the robot's teach pendant.…”

“…A comparative evaluation of the proprietary robot languages used in this translation library was performed and presented in a previous work (Souza et al , 2019). This library is an extension of the AdaptPack Studio project, presented in Silva et al (2017), Castro et al (2019), whose main objective was the development of a modular framework, aimed at accelerating the design, development and programming of palletizing robot cells.…”