Design Of Modularized Robot Off-Line Programming System Platform

There is a large amount of research on off-line programming system in China, such as off-line programming system for spraying, off-line programming system for water jet cutting and off-line programming for welding, and moreover they are capable to be used in the actural manufaction. The methods most domestic reasearchers use are very similar and they can be summarized as developing off-line programming system based on a CAD software which can be used for secondary development. Domestic researchers have to develop industrial application on expensive CAD software, due to the lack of system platform which is capable of providing the most basic and common functions in off-line programming. This method not only require developers with comprehensive knowledge of robot, but also restrict further development due to the limitations of CAD software itself. In this paper, an extensible off-line robot programming system platform is developed, on which the user can focuse on the development of industrial applications.To implement the above extensible off-line programming system platform, advantages and disadvantages of two type of flexible software structures are analyzed, and specific needs of off-line programming software are under consideration. Then the scheme of plug-in system as the whole structure of the software is determined in this paper. Plug-in mechanism of Qt development framework is used for developing plug-in software system. With the use of the observer mode, derectly calling each other among modules or plug-ins is avoided to reduce coupling among modules.Then, the whole off-line programming system is divided into several basic core modules, implemented as plug-ins. Main modules are listed as follows:three-dimensional display, virtual teach pendant, a virtual controller and file downloading. Combining OpenGL and VRML to achieve high quilty of 3D view; using real teaching box as the background, with transparency button on it, to be used for virtual teach pendant; a virtual controller with exactly the same algorithm in real physical controller; auto-generated jobs can be downloaded to the robot controller though the offered interface.There are currently a variety of practical industrial robot language appearing, in order to make universal enhancement software, the robot language implemented as a separate module in this article, so that users can replace the module according to the actual situation. INFORM ? language is used as the default programming language in this system, and a common instruction set was chosen to develope robot language interpreter. The entire robot language interpreter consists of lexical parser and grammar parser, deliverying token to complete analysing job files. INFORM ? robot language syntax is analysed and corresponding rules in context-free grammar are given. Lexical analyzer and grammar parser are implemented using Flex&Bison generate tools.Finally, using ER-16 robot as simulation object, on the basis of self-developed robot platform off-line programming system, corresponding robot job files are generated with virtual pendant programming. After simulation, job files are downloaded to the real physical robot controller, verifying the effectiveness of the basic functions of off-line programming system. According to the academic needs of laboratory, a multi-robot kinematics simulation platform and robotics semi-physical simulation are built in this paper. And this illustrates the developed robot off-line programming system platform is flexible, extensible. And the goal set in this reaserch has been achieved.