Interactive Robot Programming Research Articles

Interactive Industrial Robot Programming based on Mixed Reality and Full Hand Tracking

The paper show a state-of-the-art approach for programming industrial robotics manipulator via mixed reality holographic interface. In mixed reality, we implement basic functionality for robot programming: setting up the base and tool frames, setting the sequence of Cartesian poses and Joint positions for robot motion, robot movements simulation. The software developed is based on Unity, ROS, and MoveIt frameworks. We compared cursor-based interface (Microsoft HoloLens 1) and full hand tracking (Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Oculus Quest 2) functionalities for interactive robot programming. We tested our approach on the UR10e collaborative robot in the virtual scene and real environment. The full hand tracking human-robot interaction approach improves the setup of Cartesian and Joints robot goals in respect to cursor based interaction.

Designing user-centric programming aids for kinesthetic teaching of collaborative robots

Just as end-user programming has helped make computer programming accessible for a variety of users and settings, end-user robot programming has helped empower end-users without specialized knowledge or technical skills to customize robotic assistance that meets diverse environmental constraints and task requirements. While end-user robot programming methods such as kinesthetic teaching have introduced direct approaches to task demonstration that allow users to avoid working with traditional programming constructs, our formative study revealed that everyday people still have difficulties in specifying effective robot programs using these methods due to challenges in understanding robot kinematics and programming without situated context and assistive system feedback. These findings informed our development of Demoshop, an interactive robot programming tool that includes user-centric programming aids to help end-users author and edit task demonstrations. To evaluate the effectiveness of Demoshop, we conducted a user study comparing task performance and user experience associated with using Demoshop relative to a widely used commercial baseline interface. Results of our study indicate that users have greater task efficiency while authoring robot programs and maintain stronger mental models of the system when using Demoshop compared to the baseline interface. Our system implementation and study have implications for the further development of assistance in end-user robot programming.

IRoPro: An interactive Robot Programming Framework

The great diversity of end-user tasks ranging from manufacturing environments to personal homes makes pre-programming robots for general purpose applications extremely challenging. In fact, teaching robots new actions from scratch that can be reused for previously unseen tasks remains a difficult challenge and is generally left up to robotics experts. In this work, we present iRoPro, an interactive Robot Programming framework that allows end-users with little to no technical background to teach a robot new reusable actions. We combine Programming by Demonstration and Automated Planning techniques to allow the user to construct the robot's knowledge base by teaching new actions by kinesthetic demonstration. The actions are generalised and reused with a task planner to solve previously unseen problems defined by the user. We implement iRoPro as an end-to-end system on a Baxter Research Robot to simultaneously teach low- and high-level actions by demonstration that the user can customise via a Graphical User Interface to adapt to their specific use case. To evaluate the feasibility of our approach, we first conducted pre-design experiments to better understand the user's adoption of involved concepts and the proposed robot programming process. We compare results with post-design experiments, where we conducted a user study to validate the usability of our approach with real end-users. Overall, we showed that users with different programming levels and educational backgrounds can easily learn and use iRoPro and its robot programming process.

An interactive programming system for the IBM 7545 robot

Industrial robots may be programmed using teach methods, off-line programming languages or by using interactive robot programming systems. This paper briefly explains each method, describes the advantages of developing interactive robot programming systems, and then describes an interactive robot programming system developed for the IBM 7545 robot. The approach used in the development process, the interactive execution and user options, and a demonstration of the operation of this interactive robot programming system are also presented.