Sending pose information to UR e-series arm

Hello everyone,

We recently received an e-series arm and I have two things that I’d like to do:

  1. Set a status flag indicating whether or not the arm is in a “safe” position away from other hardware once it has dropped off items to a location as well as another flag so the robot arm knows it can pick up the items.

  2. Taking an image of an object with robot-mounted camera, estimating the pose of an object, and updating a waypoint in the program based on this pose

For (1), I will likely use the modbus tcp/ip server on the controller to just read/write coils for this. However, for (2), I’m having trouble making a solid decision. It seems like RTDE is an option, but for how infrequently these images will be taken, it seems like a lot. I don’t think I can use Modbus, since there are no float registers as far as I can tell. I was also thinking of using the interpreter mode to wait and receive the pose through URscript.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is there another good option available? Thank you in advance.