Industrial robotic system programmed from CAD files – an update

Purpose – In this paper a solution capable of extracting robot motion information from CAD data is briefly presented and explored. Design/methodology/approach – The motion information is added by the user to the CAD file, defining in this way the approach, fly‐by and welding trajectories. So the user programs the robot. An application is then used to extract that information and constitute a pre‐program, which should be tuned with the real robot using a small set of rules. In this way, versatility of robotic cells is improved and its programming is simplified. Findings – The developed CAD interface is tested using a robot welding experiment on a steel beam used for industrial buildings. Originality/value – This paper builds on work previously described in “CAD interface for automatic robot welding programming” published in Industrial Robot , Vol. 31, No. 1.