Design and development of lead-through programming method using low cost incremental encoder feedback

Abstract

Recently robots are widely used in a various field particularly in the industry. Despite this fact robot still requires an undeniable amount of knowledge from the operators or workers who deal with them. As a result, robots cannot be easily programmed if the operator or the worker is not experienced in robotics field. One of the programming methods that has been introduced to make programming task user friendly is lead-through robot programming. However, the existing lead-through programming methods still requires an amount of knowledge that is not available for most of the operators and workers. The main objective of this project is to design a lead through method for point to point robot programming using incremental encoder feedback, which can record, save and playback the robot motion while considering the accuracy and precision of the robot. To validate the method, experiments were conducted in this project, where an operator manually moves a two DOF (degree of freedom) robotic arm on a white board while the encoder feedback was recorded and later played back by the robot. Then both recorded and playback trajectories were compared and analyzed. The result shows that the played back accuracy is 96.17% for motor 1 and 97.86% for motor 2 with standard deviation of 0.9593 for motor 1 and 2.33583 for motor 2.