For the purpose of developing a practical support tool for human workers engaged in industrial robot teaching, the work domain of position teaching is analyzed in terms of means-end relations. In this work domain analysis, a mechanical explanation model is introduced to capture the force-displacement relationship inherent in and thus informative on the work system. The model is utilized for the investigation of the robot operators' decisions in search of accurate operation positions and clarifies a basic strategy making use of a characteristic frame of reference in the search space. Based on the analytical results, a prototype display is developed that can provide effective information supports. The display presents the activity-related information in a way that affords the robot operators' strategic operations and thus can successfully reduce task time and operational errors in a teaching work.
