Robotics

• Off-line Programming, funded by "863" High-Tech Plan of China.

Industrial robot's behavior is controlled by task-specific code that user designs. It usually takes a period of time to test new code for every up-coming task. Coding and debugging on real robots not only need to take a robot of production, more important, errors in testing code may produce unexpected behavior that may damage both robot and its surrounding work cells.
Off-line programming aims to overcome these deficiencies. Instead of real robot, we create a model of the robot, then implement code testing on the "virtual robot". After successful code testing, the code can be transferred to real robot to perform exactly the same action sequence.
We have built a virtual robot on SGI and developed an interpreter for the robot controlling language. Experiments in lab show that off-line programing is safe and accurate. The technique was later upgraded by another collaboration project with Hong Kong University.