Is there a way to disable protective stops? In particualr, I’m interested in disabling protective stops associated with the arm colliding with something else? Other protective stops, such as those associated with a singularity, are fine for the particular application I am working.
If there is a way to do this, can I do it programatically, through one of the available sockets? Asking because I’d actually like to turn it on and off over time, based on certain variables.
When you say “disable”, you mean to enable the robot again after a protective stop, right? Or disable the warning altogether, so it doesn’t show at all?
You can remove a protective stop through a socket, after it’s occured. You cannot disasble the popups altogether.
There’ve been several topics on the matter already. 
You can read more here: Protective Stop - Enable robot from PLC - #30 by efn
Sorry for not being clear. I want to prevent protective stops from occurring based on rapid acceleration/decelleration. Is there a way to do that?
Thank you!
The easiest way to prevent protective stops from occurring due to rapid acceleration or deceleration is the have the payload settings correct including mass, cog, and inertia. This will allow the robot to calculate the forces accurately to move the payload at the desired speeds and acceleration. You can set these dynamically. We had a two-gripper solution where we were moving rapidly, we would change the mass and CoG as we picked and placed parts so that the robot knew what was in the hands and what the specific CoG was based on what was being held (left hand only, right hand only, both hands, neither hand). The only time I have seen issues with protective stops when trying to move fast we did not have the payload set accurately. Also, remember these are collaborative robots so they are designed to stop if the detect a collision. This is all done through monitoring forces such as torque to determine if the arm is using more than the required force to execute the move.
mbush,
Thanks for your reply. I’m working on a unique application. The source of protective stops is not an error in payload setting.
So, I’m still wondering if there’s a way for me to send a command over a socket to turn off this saftey feature. I’ll also need to turn it back on, as there are certain modes in my application in which I want to have this safety feature.
Not that I am aware of, I think if this is turned off it would change the safety rating of the robot and so I am sure UR blocks that from being done. Have you tried just maxing out all of the safety settings under installation/safety?
If you’re running the robot fast enough for protective stops to occur, I would be slightly worried. It will wear out the robot too fast. UR robots are not meant for rapid accelerations/decellerations.
You can read UR’s good practices document about accelerations, decellerations and abrubt stops etc.
And, as already mentioned, it’s not possible to stop the protective stops from occuring, no.
URScript has a useful function that lets you enable warnings for situations that almost result in a protective stop. If you enable warnings and ensure that the log is clean when you test your program, then you are much more likely to avoid annoying sporadic protective stops when your robot is in production.
Try this:
position_deviation_warning(True)
Read more in the script manual: Universal Robots - Script manual - e-Series - SW 5.12
Thanks everyone for the input!