Design and implementation of a real-time control system for industrial robots based on virtual reality technology

In today’s global trend of intelligent manufacturing, intuitive and efficient industrial robot control system is essential to facilitate high-quality automation and intelligent transformation in industry. In order to solve the control difficulties of industrial robots such as complex application environment and high technology integration, virtual reality (VR) technology is widely used because the application is not limited by environment and is characterized of convenient interaction. However, the current applications of virtual reality technology on industrial robots are not able to realize the real-time control of the robot since the Virtual Reality technology is only used during the motion set compiling process, which also increases the difficulty of the interaction between workers and the system. Therefore, this paper aims at proposing a real-time control system of industrial robots based on Virtual Reality technology to achieve efficient human-robot collaboration. The modelling process uses SolidWorks, 3dsMax and Unity3D engine. Then, the operating mechanism of the system is introduced. A practical case is performed and the result shows that the system has obtained the real-time control objective, which can guide the human-robot collaboration process in different scenarios of industrial robots.