Treffer: Robot agnostic interface for industrial aplications

The quick evolution of robotic arms has generated many manufacturers of robotic arms, such as Universal Robots, ABB, or Fanuc. Each manufacturer offers a unique interface to program and control their robots. This can limit companies choices when selecting a suitable robot for their industrial operations, as they will choose an interface that doesn’t require new training. For that reason, and based on the experience at UPC CIM, this project will focus on creating a common interface for robotic arms. The main objectives are to produce an interface to simulate robots from different manufacturers, save and load data, and create a simple scripting language. By using ROS, an open-source software infrastructure to communicate between different robotic elements, and Python, the code will be created in five different modules: the launch application, obtaining information about the robot, editing files, moving the robot, and scripting actions. To test the resulting interface, first a setup sequence is performed to see the limitations of the interaction. Then, three theoretical scenarios are proposed, and a scripting sequence is created for each one: Pick and Place, Sorting, and Bin Picking. While limited in some aspects, the application performs as expected and offers the basic options to solve many robot implementations. New options for the future of robot interaction are open with this project, as people could also further develop this program if considered