User-Friendly Intuitive Teaching Tool for Easy and Efficient Robot Teaching in Human-Robot Collaboration

Production automation by human-robot collaboration has drawn significant attention due to increasing demands for automation in the manufacturing process of small electronic products, which were previously manufactured manually. Accordingly, the research for human-robot collaboration is being actively conducted and intuitive teaching is an essential technology to realize easy and efficient teaching of a collaborative robot. This paper proposes an intuitive teaching tool attached to a robot end effector that can accurately teach motions to a robot manipulator, without being affected by sensor noises. This device consists of three parts: a motion operation part for teaching six degrees of freedom motion of the robot, a motion setting part which consists of core functions necessary for teaching and a status display part for displaying the status of the teaching device and the robot. It is designed to perform teaching work by a combination of twelve switches which have one-to-one mapping relation to each degree of freedom of motion. A prototype has been implemented to verify the performance and has been applied to an experiment of six degrees of freedom motion teaching with UR5 robot.