Digital Workpiece Model Creation for the Automated Configuration and Commissioning of Industrial Robotic Applications

The configuration and commissioning of industrial robot applications is time-intensive and prone to errors since it involves manual labor. High development costs due to frequent iteration are acceptable in the context of mass production. However, many production environments have a high degree of variety in their products and, therefore, need to make changes repeatedly. Here, automation with industrial robots is not economically feasible. The concept of Industrial Robot as a Service offers a solution so that manufacturing companies can test robot systems risk-free by renting them temporarily, but the applications must be customized for the use cases at hand. For this reason, research has recently focused on the automation of engineering steps, entitled Automation of Automation. However, these approaches often rely on accurate digital models of workpieces. Unfortunately, digital workpiece models are regularly incomplete, outdated, or unavailable in industrial settings. While commercial 3D scanner systems for workpiece scanning can generate such models, their high costs and required manual efforts limit widespread adoption. This paper introduces a cost-effective method for creating workpiece models utilizing the robot itself and its peripherals. Furthermore, we explore the application of zero-shot models for digital workpiece segmentation to enhance the process and demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our method through experimental results.