198: Procedural Animation For Intuitive Industrial Robot Programming

Industrial robots are notoriously difficult to program, requiring specialized expertise in control systems, programming, and operation. This limits accessibility for designers, educators, and non-experts. This paper introduces procedural animation as an intuitive approach to industrial robot programming. Procedural animation allows users to program robots through high-level actions, while the system handles low-level constraints. We present a workflow that integrates a 3D animation environment (Blender) with robot control, using a visual programming language (VPL) that enables users to procedurally animate robot motions instead of traditional toolpath-based programming. This approach makes advanced robotic control paradigms, such as online programming, adaptive motion generation, and task orchestration, as easy to implement as conventional path planning and toolpath generation techniques. Our task examples show that this method reduces the complexity of robotic programming, enabling users to create adaptable robot motions with minimal training. By bringing fundamental principles in video game development into robotics, this research introduces a promising paradigm for industrial robot programming that makes advanced and adaptable control systems more accessible to novice users.