Offline programming

In order to apply offline programming (OLP) effectively, there are two preconditions which represent a “must” in this case.

1. On one hand, a robot has to dispose of a sufficiently exact absolute positioning accuracy.

1. On the other hand, the the transformation from the component’s to the robot’s coordinate system has to be known exactly.

The target of offline programming is that in the near future, manual teach-in inside the robot cell may be completely dropped.
In practice, it is nevertheless often the case that, during the start up phase of a new model, there are component modifications which lead to the fact that, as research stands nowadays, non teach-in OLP is not realizable yet.

At the moment it is more realistic to aim at an intermediate solution: The theoretic CAD model should correspond to the real facts.

In order to attain this target, a so-called “roundload” has to be effected. This means that there is not only a download of the CAD model into the robot cell but also an upload from the robot cell into the CAD model. The upload is carried out after the measurement of the robot basis and the manual teach-in of the component modifications.

On condition of a functioning roundload it is possible to introduce the production of a new model while that of the old model is running without having to stop the cell at any time.