MRTC research projects

Over the past few decades the use of industrial robots has increased a company's efficiency as well as strengthens their competitiveness in the market. Thus, in many cases an investment in industrial robots is seen as a vital action that will strengthen a company's position in the market. Despite this fact, in many cases, robot automation investments are considered to be technically challenging as well as costly by small and medium sized enterprises (SME). An industrial robot must be placed in a cell that will occupy valuable space in the workshop and maybe operate only a couple of hours a day. In addition, no matter how simple the production process might be, to integrate the robot, one has to rely on a robot programming expert, a so-called integrator. Robot programming requires expert knowledge not only in robot kinematics, but the integrator must also master advanced software engineering. Obviously, these issues result in challenges with regard to e.g., high costs, limited flexibility, and reduced productivity.

We hypothesize that in order to make industrial robots more common within the SME sector, the robots should be reprogrammable by task experts rather than robot programming experts. In this context we define a task expert as a person that has expert knowledge on the manufacturing/production process that will undergo automatization through an industrial robot investment. As described above, no matter how knowledgeable the task expert is on the manufacturing/production process itself, he will need assistance while integrating the robot into the production process.

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