Hi everyone, I’m new to robot development, and more specifically, I’m working on a cobot from Universal Robots (UR). In this case, I want to connect the cobot’s controller to another controller. This second controller will send values, which represent the coordinates X, Y, Z of a workspace. After receiving these values, my cobot should move to the specified position and continue executing the program.
My question is: What tools can I use to receive these values and set the waypoint? Additionally, is there a manual or any resources about integrating the UR controller with another controller, like an ESP32 or Raspberry Pi?
There are a few ways to do it, the first time I was trying this was with 2 robots hooked up together and i found modbus the easiest way to do it because I could see the values on the GUI, and I’m not the most literate when it comes to most programming languages. However, using the Primary, Secondary, and Realtime Interface should work better in your case. here is a link to the support page. https://docs.universal-robots.com/tutorials/urscript-tutorials/socket-communication.html
and here is a link to other useful documentation that UR provides, ROS might be another avenue worth looking at depending on what your looking to do. https://docs.universal-robots.com/
Hi, you have multiple approaches you can use depending on what type of controller and hardware you have available:
PLC: PROFINET comes with boolean, integer and float registers that you can use for this purpose.
Microcontrollers with basic bus communication: MODBUS is used under the hood is most tools, this could also be suitable for you.
Average end-user computer: I would go for a Python server, that sends the coordinates to the robot through either Ethernet IP or XML-RPC.