Scheduling POP-Star for automatic creation of robot cell programs

Abstract

Typical pick and place, and machine tending applications often require an industrial robot to be embedded in a cell and to communicate with other devices in the cell. Programming the program logic is a tedious job, requiring expert programming knowledge, and it can take more time than programming the specific robot movements itself. We propose a new system, which takes in the description of the whole manufacturing process in natural language as input, fills in the implicit actions, and plans the sequence of actions to accomplish the task described in minimal makespan using a modified partial planning algorithm. Finally we demonstrate that the proposed system can come up with a sensible plan for the given instructions.