A Reference-Giving Device Prototype for Performance Assessment of Closed-Loop Robot Systems

Industrial robot systems that determine or adapt their motion at runtime using sensor data are expected to gain popularity in manufacturing, due to higher flexibility, less programming effort and the possibility to enable new processes that have been difficult to automate with classical open-loop motion. For the performance assessment of such robot systems, a new benchmarking method for closed-loop systems, inspired by ISO 9283, was proposed in [1]. However, for real-world experiments, a device is required that allows to shape the measurements recorded by external sensors, and thus creates well-defined (artificial) robot motion. In this paper, we propose a design for such a reference-giving device, show the build and test it for fulfillment of its requirements. Finally, we demonstrate the suitability of the reference-giving device in a closed-loop benchmark on two different state-of-the-art industrial robot systems using the performance assessment methodology from [1].