Off-line programming and simulation from CAD drawings: Robot-assisted sheet metal bending

Abstract

Increasingly, industrial robots are being used in production systems. This is because they are highly flexible machines and economically competitive with human labor. The problem is that they are difficult to program. Thus, manufacturing system designers are looking for more intuitive ways to program robots, especially using the CAD drawings of the production system they developed. This paper presents an industrial application of a novel CAD-based off-line robot programming (OLP) and simulation system in which the CAD package used for cell design is also used for OLP and robot simulation. Thus, OLP becomes more accessible to anyone with basic knowledge of CAD and robotics. The system was tested in a robot-assisted sheet metal bending cell. Experiments allowed identifying the pros and cons of the proposed solution.

Design and Development of Sheet-Metal Elbows Using Programming with Visual Basic for Applications in CATIA

“…A number of the scientific publications on the development and manufacture of sheetmetal parts have dealt with the subject from different points of view. These range from tools for the design of sheet-metal parts with Solid Edge as educational tools [6], and assisted manufacturing for drawing sheet-metal parts [7], to visual inspection techniques with CAD data [8], manufacturing technologies from CAD files [9], the application of CAD/CAM technology in the development and lofting of complex sheet parts [10], robot-assisted sheet-metal bending with off-line programming and simulation from CAD drawings [11], and the automatic import of XML files with optimised geometric information from 3D CAD models of sheet-metal parts [12].…”