Demonstration of Drawing by Robotic Arm using RoboDK and C#

Abstract

Purpose: Robots are transforming the world, and soon they will take part or assist in our all-daily life activities. There are several fields where robots are already doing well, like Surgery, painting, industrial automation, autonomous navigation, engraving, 3D printing, and many more. The robot is nothing but consists of some mechanical movement driven by functions and algorithms. To get the perfect result, the algorithm working behind the scene also needs to be perfect. In all the above fields, need to reach the end effector at the exact position. That is why we need serious research on it. Otherwise, it will remain a plaything, cannot be engaged in an important role. Before implementing it into an actual application, we need to test in a simulated environment, especially when writing new methods. The simulation environment is the safest place where anything that goes wrong cannot damage a physical entity. So, the robot researcher prefers the simulator. The RoboDK is one of the famous robot simulators. Its interface is excellent and easy to test any commercial robot inside the IDE. In our research will see how to keep marking the end-effector position using the graphical method. When our end-effector moves, it holds a footprint to inspect later. This one is a minimalistic approach. Through the simplified drawing method, we can observe arm movement. This demonstration will use an optimized version of C# API, which RoboDK provides.

Design/Methodology/Approach: In RoboDK IDE, we can create a new station or import existing built-in available stations. Our application drives the simulator robot. It is developed in C# language using Microsoft visual studio 2019 community edition. Both applications communicate through socket communication. Pressing the mouse's left click, when we move the mouse, it calculates the mouse pointer position and maps the value based on the robot drawing area. Then the values are sent to the simulated robot. Fetching the value, RoboDK moves into the desired position.

Findings/result: Using our research works, the researcher can get some references to enhance their research work. We keep our code as simple as possible to be understood quickly and easily integrate into their research work.

Originality/Value: We search the research work on RoboDK and C# language. Most of the documents are available in the python language, even in little bit documents present in the RoboDK example collection. So, we decided to migrate from python to our native language, C#. That is why this research work. After lots of hard work, we achieved it. If anyone wants to research RoboDK using C# API, it can reference their research work.

Paper Type: Simulation-based Research.