Background
This project was funded through an ARM Institute Project Call that sought to respond to pervasive areas of need in U.S. manufacturing and, specifically, address key Department of Defense (DoD) manufacturing-focused Modernization Priorities. This and the other selected projects address issues found by the DoD and commercial community to be the most urgent and important that the ARM Institute’s ecosystem of 330+ member organizations can help solve.
Objective & Technical Approach to Robot Programming Assistance Project
There are technologies that can now dramatically reduce the knowledge necessary to program and install a robot, using no-code methods that make robotic programming accessible to those on the factory floor. However, there is still the limitation of process automation knowledge that can bottleneck or be a detriment to a successful robotic installation. Robot programming can be outside of the technical knowledge of those on the factory floor, necessitating a method of bridging the gap.
This project aims to create a robot programming assistance system which can act as a stopgap for this lack of expertise by providing suggestions and corrections during robot task programming. This system will use AI and Machine Learning methods to learn a model of the industrial task from previously programmed tasks and use this corpus to aid the user. This will allow a novice programmer to approach expert-level programming by way of AI assistance for robot programming.