A Framework for Online and Offline Programming of Multi-Robot Cooperative Motion Planning.

A multi-robot system has more flexibility than a single robot, but cooperative path planning between multi-robot systems is still laborious. Offline programming(OLP), which can automatically generate robotic programs based on workpiece models, is a key technology for accelerating the intelligent manufacturing revolution. Most of these OLP softwares support a limited number of robots and lack support for multi-robot coop- erative programming and reality interaction, which prevents the robot’s advantages from being utilized and results in a common user programming experience. Therefore, this paper proposes a general offline programming framework based on SolidWorks, which enables the robot to be configured for programming following user needs. This framework provides a path-tracking function that, when combined with SolidWorks assembly and motion study, greatly simplifies the process of cooperative path planning. To increase the effectiveness of offline programming, a topic communication mechanism is used to establish a method for the framework to communicate with external devices and to obtain sensor data to help program through teaching and other means. Then, a dual robots cooperation experiment is conducted to confirm the viability and simplicity of the framework.