Hand Gesture-Based On-Line Programming of Industrial Robot Manipulators

Abstract

Robots are widely used in industrial manufacturing processes and play an important role in the enhancement of industrial organizations productivity. One of the major issues that engineers are facing is that, current programming methods are too time-consuming and they lack of intuitiveness use by human users. However, the latest advances in the field of sensors, let manufacturers to develop and produce devices that allow humans to interact with machines in a more intuitive way, reducing the need of additional complex software components, and hence, the required time to establish the aforementioned human-machine interactions. This research work presents an approach for gesture-based on-line programming of industrial robot manipulators. This is achieved by utilizing a combination of devices with a set of integrated, cost-effective visual and bending sensors, in order to precisely track the user's hand position and gestures at system run-time. This continuous tracking allows the robot manipulator to mimic the operator’s hand motion. In addition, desired paths performed by a human with expertise on task execution, are translated into robot targets, composing a new robot path, and are stored for later use. Such path can be modified to fit into different robot manufacturers, programming language. Further steps of the presented approach will include the possibility of path optimization by the industrial manipulator itself.