Using Uirtual Reality for Industrial Robot Programming: A Preliminary Study.

The tedious effort required to physically program an industrial robot using a teach pendant, or the high mental load required in a CAD-like desktop environment for robot programming, can be quite daunting for novice users. Consequently, this group of users might pay much attention to minor details on the screen, ignore hints in error messages, and not consider the programming task in a holistic manner. This paper describes a preliminary study utilizing a quasi-experimental mixed method to determine whether the use of a virtual reality (VR) add-on in the computer-aided programming environment would help novice users overcome these known issues, and thus improve their performance in programming a robot. The results, including a comparison of individual participant's task performance and a post-experiment survey on participants' experience and preference of using VR for path planning, are presented. This paper concludes with a discussion of incorporating VR into an existing curriculum and the direction of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]