Robot path planning based on CAD drawings or images

In manufacturing industries, for applications such as welding and gluing, robots have to follow repeatedly established paths that are usually taught manually using a teach pendant. This method is easy and does not require advanced programming skills. However, this approach is very onerous and time-consuming, especially if you need to modify the robot path. For this reason, having a way that automatically generates robot programs containing the path information from a CAD model or a picture of the product to be processed can be very convenient. In this work, we present a system that is capable of generating robot paths from CAD drawings or images. The system extracts geometric data from the input file and can either produce a program that contains the path to be performed or send directly the path points to the robot controller. The effectiveness of this work has been tested first in simulation environments and then in real robots. The first results are promising. This thesis is meant to be the starting point for further works.