Supporting Semantic Capture during Kinesthetic Teaching of Collaborative Industrial Robots

Industrial robot systems being deployed today do not contain domain knowledge to aid robot operators in setup and operational use. To gather such knowledge in a robot context requires mechanisms for entering and capturing semantic data, that will gradually build a working vocabulary while interacting with environment and operators, for bootstrapping system knowledge and ensuring data collection over time. This paper presents a prototype user interface, assisting kinesthetic teaching of a collaborative industrial robot, that allows for capturing semantic information while working with the robot in day-to-day use. A graphical user interface with natural language processing builds a working vocabulary of the environment while modifying and/or creating robot programs. A simple demonstration illustrates the approach.