INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION, cilt.32, sa.6, ss.665-672, 2017 (SCI-Expanded)
The people interested in industrial robots at a beginner level, such as engineers, operators, or technicians, as well as robotics lecturers typically have difficulties during their first interactions with a robot. The first difficulty is to create a relation between the robot and the mathematical equations of its kinematics. One of the other barriers is to learn the robot workspace and the robot manipulator's reachability. After achieving these two steps, it possible to start robot programming and physical robot interaction appropriate for industrial robot applications. In this study, a novel interactive training platform is presented. This platform is designed for the offline programming of industrial robots and its goals are to support robot education, practical robot study, and industrial robot science. In this interactive robot platform, all commercial robot brands' manipulator geometry configuration and new manipulator geometry designs can be created. All functions such as programming, basic movement type (linear, joint, reorient), manipulator workspaces definition, tool centre point and axis velocity, acceleration are available. The platform presents some solid objects that can be inserted in the workspace and can make demonstrations for programming. There are also real programming logic controller and robot connections for offline programming. This platform is designed and developed based on open-source libraries, is small in size, and is able to work on all operating systems (e.g., Windows, Mac, and Linux). This software may not be a satisfactory tool for robot specialists but is very effective for beginners in robot programming, such as students and robot operators in the plant.