Offline Programming of Collision Free Trajectories for Palletizing Robots

Abstract

The use of robotic palletizing systems has been increasing in the so-called Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry. However, because of the type of solutions developed, focused on high performance and efficiency, the degree of adaptability of packaging solutions from one type of product to another is extremely low. This is a relevant problem, since companies are changing their production processes from low variety / high volume to high variety / low volume. This environment requires companies to perform the setup of their robots more frequently, which has been leading to the need to use offline programming tools that decrease the required robot stop time. This work addresses these problems and, in this paper, is described the solution proposed for the automated offline development of collision free robot programs for palletizing applications.

AdaptPack Studio: an automated intelligent framework for offline factory programming

“…The “Robot Trajectory Generation System” was implemented as a feature inside the “Palletizing Routine Generation” module and, if activated, checks possible collisions in the trajectory between the pick and place points. This system was constructed inside a class called PathPlanning.cs , as illustrated in Figure 1, and features two path planners (Castro et al , 2019): the first uses an A* algorithm discretized in the joint space (Silva et al , 2017); and the second uses the A* discretized in the Cartesian space. …”

“…The last presents buttons which enable the activation of the "Robot Trajectory Generation System", based on the A Ã search algorithm, developed by Tavares et al (2016). Besides the joint space trajectory generated by Silva et al (2017), the current work introduces a Cartesian space trajectory generation. This new approach allowed decreasing the computation time and the smoothing of the robot trajectory.…”

“…This system was constructed inside a class called PathPlanning. cs, as illustrated in Figure 1, and features two path planners (Castro et al, 2019): 1 the first uses an A Ã algorithm discretized in the joint space (Silva et al, 2017); and 2 the second uses the A Ã discretized in the Cartesian space.…”

“…There are also alternative simulation software packages in the market, such as the FlexSim (2020), Anylogic (2020) and SIMIO(2020), but they do not perform detailed simulation of robot motions and offline robot programming. The work proposed by Silva et al (2017) presents a solution for the automatic offline generation of collision-free robot programs. In their work, a framework that aids the programming and path generation of palletizing routines has been developed.…”

AdaptPack studio translator: translating offline programming to real palletizing robots

“…A comparative evaluation of the proprietary robot languages used in this translation library was performed and presented in a previous work (Souza et al , 2019). This library is an extension of the AdaptPack Studio project, presented in Silva et al (2017), Castro et al (2019), whose main objective was the development of a modular framework, aimed at accelerating the design, development and programming of palletizing robot cells.…”