Research On The Task Simulation And Real-time Monitoring Of The VR-based Industrial Robot

VR(abbreviation of Virtual Reality) has excellent interactive and immersive performance, Using the VR technology for the industrial robot's path planning can not only take advantage of the property of the reality and real-time path planning of the online teaching method but also make use of the advantages of offline programming path planning such as efficiency, repeatability, high security, being able to perform complex path planning and so on. Therefore, a more effective and convenient way of the industrial robot's path planning can be formed. Using VR technology for the surveillance of the industrial robot's working status has its strong points. On one hand, industrial robots can display their positions and orientations of the degrees of freedom on screen, which cuold help the monitoring personnel to master the working status of the robots; on the other hand, the data of the real-time working angle of each joint can be printed and saved, which could effectively compensate for the current industrial robot's video surveillance of working data in order to perform fast troubleshooting and improve production efficiency. Therefore, this study has done research on two parts: One was to use the VRtechnology for the industrial robot's path planning, and the other one was to use the VR technology to monitor the working status of industrial robots.To achive the goals, we have mainly done the work as follows:(1) Blender, a kind of open source 3D animation software, was used here to create virtual reality environments and was used as virtual reality engine. We first used the KUKA-KR16 industrial robot as researching object and used SolidWorks to draw part models; second, we imported the models into the virtual reality environment created by Blender. In Blender, the part models were set up and added bones, eventually, we got the KUKA KR16 industrial robot model that was bound with Armature in the virtual reality environment.(2) We used the 3D printing technology to print a teaching model, which was embeded with the rotary potentiometers in the joint places, and use them to work as joints. When the link rotated, the potentiometer was drived and would generate rotation angle information.(3) We used the Arduino controller to read angle data and transported them through serial port into the virtual reality environment.(4) We wrote a Python script which could realize the real-time control of the motion of the robot model in the virtual reality environment. We used pySerial to receive the angle data transported from Arduino and used Python script to drive the bones to move as the teaching model did,we then used the teaching robot to do an path planning experiment to test the result of the controlling, at the same time, we printed the angle data on the screen and record it for the further study.(5) We bound the rotary potentiometer to the teaching robot's joints.When the teaching robot moved, it drove the rotary potentiometer to rotate a proportional angle so that it could drive the robot in the virtual reality environment to do the same movement. At the same time, angle data were printed on screen and recorded. Finally, we used the third joint to do an experiment to test the surveillance effect.At last, according to the experimental results, we could draw a conclusion that we have realized the control of the robot model in the virtual reality environment with the teaching robot model and achieved the goal of real-time surveillance. We also gave the angle data on screen and saved it in a file for the purpose of path planning. Finally, we gave some advice on the follow-up study.