Development Of An Industrial Robot Teach Pendant Based On ROS

With the development of industrial technologies, the industrial robots are equipped to replace human beings gradually on the tasks that need simple and repetitive motions, high strength or high precision. The teach pendant is a robot operator's primary device of controlling a robot, whose advanced techniques are monopolized by the large international companies. Therefore, it is signi ficant to develop an universal, open, functional, and interactive teach pendant.In this thesis, a framework of an industrial robot group based on the ROS's message-passing communication was proposed, in which a single teach pendant can control or teach multi-type robots. This architecture features several advantages, e.g. easy to establish the communication system, easy to manage the modularizational design and complex system, easy to be developed and expanded, and easy to control multi-type robots with various software tools. The eventual design scheme is proposed based on the analysis of safety, stability, universality, openess, functionality and interactivity based on the framework.The electric system design based on the core hardware of the teach pendant, which is the ARM cortex-A8CPU. The configuration above ensures the arithmetic speed the underlying supports. Moreover, the hardware also offers a support to the fine and complicated interactive interface, and simultaneously increases the response speed of the user input. The teach pendant uses a3-axis joystick with a button, a7inch LCD touch screen and the membrane switches for the user input, which improves the users' interactive experiences. In the mechanical structure design, the mechanical structure of the teach pendant housing is designed based on the ergonomics standards, which improves the operation flexibility. Meanwhile, it provides a structural support and protection for the electric system.The MVC framework is utilized in the interactive software design. Qt-quick module is used to develop the touchable interactive interface based on the design principles e.g. simplicity, safety, humanization etc., which improves the users' interactive experiences. The Arduino lib is employed in the controller to simplify the hardware monitoring and implement the users' inputs definition. In the model function, a series of functions can be realized based on ROS and X11lib e.g. control-teach-playback, offline programming, calibration, coordinate system assignment, robot status display, workspace limit, system status display, user management, and system control, etc. The data shared on ROS master server based on Ethernet.Finally, a semi-physical simulation training platform is built up based on ROS for the proposed teach pendant. This platform offers a simulation environment for training users' before operating a real robot system. Based on that, the developed teach pendant system was tested on the virtual model and the real prototype. The results show the effectiveness of the developed system, which fulfils the requirements of the basic functions.