High-Level Programming for Industrial Robotics : using Gestures , Speech and Force Control

Today, most industrial robots are programmed using the typical teaching process. This paper presents a robotic system where the user can instruct and program a robot just showing what it should do, and with a high-level of abstraction from the robot language. This is done using the two most natural human interfaces (gestures and speech), a force control system and several code generation techniques. The performance of this system is compared with a similar system that instead of gestures uses a manual guidance system based on a force control strategy. Two different demonstrations with two different robots (MOTOMAN and ABB) are presented, showing that the developed systems can be customised for different users and robots.