A Visual Programming Environment on Tablet PCs to Control Industrial Robots

Abstract

Industrial robots have been usually controlled using text-based programming languages provided by each manufacturer with its button-based TP(Teaching Pendent) terminal. Unfortunately, when we consider that people who manipulate TPs in manufacturing sites are mostly unskilled with no background knowledge about computer programming, these text-based programming languages using button-based interaction on manufacturing sites are too difficult for them to learn and use. In order to overcome the weaknesses of the text-based programming language, we propose a visual programming language that can be easily used on gesture-enabled devices. Especially, in our visual programming environment, each command is represented as a block and robots are controlled by stacking those blocks using drag-and-drop gestures, which is easily learnable even by beginners. In this paper, we utilize a widely-spread device, Tablet PC as the gesture-enabled TP. Considering that Tablet PC has limited display space in contrast to PC environments, we designed different kinds of sets of command blocks and conducted user tests. Based on the experiment results, we propose an effective set of command blocks for Tablet PC environment.