A system to assist robotized welding for SME's

Abstract In the frame of the EC-Program COPERNICUS a CAD-Based Programming System for arc-welding robots is under development in an international project with German and Hungarian participants. The basic goal of the system is to assist robotized arc-welding in SMEs mostly for small and medium lot sizes. The product of the development will be such an interactive offline robot programming system that gives assistance to easily design and then perform arc-welding tasks. Commercially available offline robot programming systems are either too expensive or cannot provide all required functionalities. In order to allow the system to be integrated into a CIM environment, standardised OSI (Open System Interconnection) interfaces have been chosen. This paper concentrates on the work of our laboratory and follows the project until its half-time review meeting held in June 1995. This way “program generation”,”communication” and ”MAP interfacing” will be discussed in details together with the demonstration environment.