Software framework concept with visual programming and digital twin for intuitive process creation with multiple robotic systems

Abstract

With the progressive digitalization in industrial manufacturing, the usage of complex robotic systems in both intralogistics and production is expected to increase. This proposes a challenge for planners and shop floor workers, as programming and interacting with these various systems leads to a high cognitive load. Especially the broad range of different manufacturer specific software leads to a number of problems, e.g. the program-synchronization between different systems and the often necessary workshops for workers. These problems can lead to inefficient programming and planning operations, bad worker satisfaction and human errors. In this paper, we present a modular, system agnostic and human centered software framework that unifies the programming of different systems, to enable centralized and intuitive system programming for non-expert operators. Our software framework utilizes visual programming concepts together with an integrated digital twin of the factory and a novel graph-based programming interface. We explain our concept in detail and describe our validation through integration into a realistic industrial setup with three different systems. In addition, we provide an evaluation of our concept's usability with an experimental user study and discuss the results of the study and the software implementation. Our study results show that even non-technical users are able to use our software after a brief introduction to create complex processes that involve multiple machines working in parallel. All users reported high usability and expert users reported that the visual process editor has enough features to create processes for industrial applications. Finally, we conclude this paper by providing an outlook on future work and use-cases of our software.