Samy – Cobot Programming Made Easy!

Collaborative robots (Cobots) provide flexibility in production. They can be adapted to different tasks and are therefore often superior to traditional industrial robots in terms of profitability. However, they are not yet able to develop their full potential, since any significant modification to the control program of these robot systems currently requires expert knowledge. And these modifications not only affect the software but also the safety and risk assessment.

This is where the research project “SAMY” (semi-automatic modification of control programs of industrially used collaborative robot systems) comes into play.

The research project led by Fraunhofer Austria and funded by the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology serves as a trailblazer for the widespread use of collaborative robots in manufacturing SMEs. The project goal is the development of an easy to use programming method that can be modified without explicit robotics expertise.

Instead of so-called imperative programming – a sequence of commands – declarative programming will be applied. Using the problem description, the Cobot automatically determines the solution. Together with the project partners, a method will be developed to convert this description into a code readable by the machine.

Our innovative simulation software twin acts as a test environment for automatic testing of this generated robot code.

We are very happy to be part of the project partners’ team as simulation experts. By the way, the project kick-off took place virtually due to the Corona crisis. A fitting start for the future virtual processes in this exciting project!