Offline Programming

Often visually programming the robot will be too restrictive if involving spatial information that is by nature not physical but digital. If the robot is meant to follow precise trajectories that are first found in digital files or can only be generated by algorithmic means, working off the teach pendant is at most a frustrating experience or at worst a dead end. In this case the best course of action is not to use the teach pendant at all for programming, but by generating a robot program off the robot controller entirely. At its core a robot controller executes sequences of commands described in a manufacturer-specific syntax, well-documented and abstracted away by node-based user interfaces. Generating a robot program comes down to writing this sequence of instructions in a text file, following the correct syntax. It can be done by hand in a text editor, but more practically it by writing a script or using a computer program that will ingest, transform and export data into a final robot program.