A Relational Data Base Supporting CAD-Oriented Robot Programming

Programming of action sequences for multirobot assembly cells involves the representation, the specification and the modelling of the cell activities. For this purpose a chain of activities producing and consuming information has to be performed. Process planning in manufacturing requires that a product’s design must be translated into the best method for the product’s manufacture. The final plan will consist of information about the manufacturing process to be applied, its process parameters, the machines to be used and the time schedule. Synthesizing of the process information and the use of decision logic may be performed by a human expert aided by CAD and CAM software tools or by high sophisticated automatic planner software systems. The bridge between CAD, CAM and Robotics would be the use of a database management system, which supports each activity with appropriate information. A basic representation scheme for the different information and object classes used for planning and programming facilitates the common share of information. In this paper the use of the NF2 data model is discussed to build manufacturing cell models, to construct product assembly plan information and to specify elementary robot actions. The steps for constructing an executable robot assembly program is illustrated. The program is tested with the aid of the graphical Robot Simulation system ROSI and the data base management system R2D2.