We recently received an e-series arm and I have two things that I’d like to do:
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.
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.
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.
For (1), I will likely use the modbus tcp/ip server on the controller to just read/write coils for this
The robot already comes with a Modbus unit that maps all the current values (ModBus Server Data.pdf), I think it is the easiest. Now, to prevent that you accidentally overwrite another value, I would create a 2nd Modbus unit, where the registers can be mapped as input and your program can write on them.
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
If you take one of our partner cameras (Inbolt, Robotiq, OnRobot, SICK,…) they already come with a URCap that you can install and directly guides you through a standard calibration procedure, teaching objects wizard/setup, and the object poses can be directly found on the URCaps URScript/URCap programming nodes.
On the other hand, if you want to go with your own camera, here you have some ideas:
Which mostly depends on what camera and project you are working on: if you have a PLC, if you are using ROS, if the camera is only available through Ethernet TCP / UDP, if it is a webcam,…