A robot operating device includes a camera that is attached to a distal end of a robot arm or a position adjacent to the distal end and that acquires an image; a display which displays the image acquired by the camera; an operation-accepting unit which accepts an operation that is performed by an operator on the image displayed on the display unit; and a controller which moves the robot arm based on the operation accepted by the operation-accepting unit.

A method for controlling a robot includes applying a setpoint force to a contact point; measuring a contact stiffness at the contact point; and slowing down the moving robot using its drives and/or braking the robot to apply the setpoint force to the contact point by the slowing down and/or slowed down robot depending on the measured contact stiffness, wherein the robot is slowed down before the setpoint force is reached.

The present invention proposes an inverse kinematics modeling and solving principle for multi-axis systems based on axis invariant, including: the D-H and D-H parameter determination principle based on fixed axis invarian, “Ju-Gibbs” quaternion and class direction cosine matrix principle, the inverse solution principle of general 6R and 7R robotic arms based on axial invariant. These principles are versatile, convenient, and precise. They can be set up as circuits, code, directly or indirectly, partially or completely within a multi-axis robot system. In addition, the present invention also includes analysis verification system constructed on these principles for designing and verifying multi-axis robot systems.

Systems, methods, and apparatus for tracking location of an inspection robot are disclosed. An example apparatus for tracking inspection data may include an inspection chassis having a plurality of inspection sensors configured to interrogate an inspection surface, a first drive module and a second drive module, both coupled to the inspection chassis. The first and second drive module may each include a passive encoder wheel and a non-contact sensor positioned in proximity to the passive encoder wheel, wherein the non-contact sensor provides a movement value corresponding to the first passive encoder wheel. An inspection position circuit may determine a relative position of the inspection chassis in response to the movement values from the first and second drive modules.

A robot comprises at least one articulate arm having members including a base, an end effector and a plurality of links, wherein each link is movably connected to two others of said members by respective joints, at least one sensor for detecting an external force acting on any one of the members, and a controller for controlling movements of the joints, so as to move the end effector along a pre-programmed path. In case of the sensor detecting an external force, the controller is adapted to adopt a first release strategy for escaping from the external force, to evaluate whether the first strategy is successful, and if not, to adopt a second release strategy.

A robot control system includes a first control device including a first communication unit and one or more second control devices connected to the first control device through a network. Each of the second control devices includes a second communication unit that exchanges data with the first communication unit of the first control device using a communication resource of a network allocated thereto, and a command value generation unit that sequentially generates a command value for driving the robot, in accordance with a command from the first control device. The robot control system includes a communication resource setting unit that allocates the communication resource to each second control device.

A walking control method for a biped robot includes: detecting whether the biped robot is in an unbalanced state; in response to detection that the biped robot is in the unbalanced state, obtaining a predicted balance step length corresponding to the biped robot in the unbalanced state; performing a smooth transition processing on the predicted balance step length according to a current movement step length of the biped robot to obtain a desired balance step length corresponding to the predicted balance step length; determining a planned leg trajectory of the biped robot according to the desired balance step length; and controlling a current swing leg of the biped robot to move according to the planned leg trajectory.

The present disclosure relates to utilizing idle processing resources of a robot to reduce future burden on such processing resources. In particular, idle processing resources are utilized to identify future scenarios, and generate reactions to such future scenarios. The generated reactions are stored, and quickly retrieved as needed if corresponding identified future scenarios occur.

Provided is an operation command generation device including: an execution order determination unit configured to determine, based on respective arrangement positions of a plurality of process symbols each representing a process for a process subject on a protocol chart including the plurality of process symbols, an execution order of the plurality of process symbols; and a process symbol conversion unit configured to respectively convert the plurality of process symbols into jobs for a process system including at least a robot so that processes represented by the plurality of process symbols are executed in the execution order determined by the execution order determination unit.

A spare robot controller for replacing any one of a plurality of initial robot controllers configured to control operation of respective industrial robots includes a key storage storing a plurality of shared keys and a secure storage. The spare robot controller is configured to decrypt, using one of the shared keys, an encrypted backup copy of the initial robot controller to be replaced, and to store resulting data in the secure storage. In embodiments, the is configured to extract data from the secure storage during operation and to encrypt the extracted data, using a selected one of the shared keys, for storage as a backup copy in a backup storage available to all of the initial robot controllers.