The CAD drawing as a source of data for robot programming purposes – a review

Silesian University of Technology, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Engineering Processes Automation and Integrated Manufacturing Systems, Konarskiego 18A St., 44-100 Gliwice, Poland

^* Corresponding author: krzysztof.foit@polsl.pl

Abstract

Industrial robots are widely used in mass production, successfully replacing the workers during repetitive tasks. The lack of direct human participation in the production process involves the necessity of programming of the machines, which is mostly the time-consuming process. Most of the operations are well described in the process documentation, but some actions require the use of complicated paths, like for example welding, laser or water cutting, edge grinding, application of liquid sealants or films of paint etc. All of the mentioned activities need the precise movements of robot’s effector and this is - in many cases - connected with the necessity of entering of many points that approximate the path. One of the ways to solve this problem is the possibility of generating the complex path automatically, using the information from the technical documentation. This paper presents such approach that uses the CAD drawings as a data source. The available literature presents this problem mainly in the aspects of large software applications, but this paper was focused on presenting the problems of the proper analysis of the drawing and how to process the data to the form that can be used during robot programming.