Thesis Details
End-User Cobot Programming in Augmented Reality
Due to the recent expansion of affordable, collaborative robots, a rapid increase comes in the automation share in small and medium enterprises, and it is expected to be even higher in upcoming years. Together with the increasing number of robots, the number of robot programmers must inevitably rise as well. To boost the spread of automation, the price for robot programming needs to be decreased; otherwise, small enterprises would not be able to afford it. One way to decrease the programming cost is to simplify the process and allow less-skilled and less-educated operators to perform it.
The presented thesis deals with the problem of contemporary user interfaces for end-user robot programming, which are still too demanding for ordinary shop-floor workers. As for now, most of the interaction between humans and robots, both during the programming and the execution phases, takes place, not in the space occupied by the robot but somewhere else -- in a computer, on the display of the attached device, etc. This forces the human to think of spatial relations of the created program constantly and to map the program to the real environment mentally. To overcome this problem, the thesis proposes several methods based on Augmented Reality, which presents the spatial information in the actual environment in an understandable way. Moreover, in-situ user interfaces for such interaction methods are presented and evaluated in several user studies with more than 70 participants. A fully functional prototype of a universal robot programming tool intended for the end-users is presented.
Augmented Reality; End-User Robot Programming; Human-Robot Interaction, Natural Interfaces.
@phdthesis{FITPT891,
author = "Michal Kapinus",
type = "Ph.D. thesis",
title = "End-User Cobot Programming in Augmented Reality",
school = "Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology",
year = 2023,
location = "Brno, CZ",
language = "english",
url = "https://www.fit.vut.cz/study/phd-thesis/891/"
}