Operators would enter these steps into the computer, or in some cases an operator would guide the robot through the steps and the robot would remember the path. Besides taking a lot of time, these steps required well-trained, knowledgeable personnel. To be most effective, these workers often had to know the idiosyncrasies of the particular robot and controller, and new employees tended to have relatively long learning curves. After all the time and effort, the new program would only be valid for one particular part, and another part would require everyone to start again from step 1. If the manufacturer did not have a spare robot specifically for training purposes, the line had to be shut down completely while the robot was retrained.
Few companies can afford that much downtime.
Several software advances have made reprogramming much simpler and quicker. To support large-scale flexible manufacturing, device programming is now migrating to a task level. For example, instead of a programmer telling a robot to move from point A to point B to point C, an operator would just give one command telling it to move along the length of the piece. Contained within the software is the built-in intelligence to interpret this move command correctly. Rather than having to write code, users now have the ability to characterize the behavior of the process through a series of pull-down menus.