We would like to upgrade the Polyscope version on our UR5 (currently 5.3.1), however our setup does not have a USB port available and for other bureaucratic reasons USB sticks aren’t an option for us. Is it possible to update the UR5 without using a USB stick?
Current progress: I am able to load .urup files onto the robot via the sftp connection. I can actually see the .urup file when navigating via the onboard Polyscope screen (via the program load option with “show” set to “all Files”) however the update screen doesn’t detect the update.
How about removing the SD card? Then you can flash an updated image to the card from a computer. 
That sounds like it would work, however I’d like for this to be a last resort.
A little more detail on our setup: We have a Clearpath Husky with the UR5 Mounted on it, and the control box is unfortunately not easily accessible (read: all the crap we have mounted to the top of the Husky would need to come off of it). There is a small touchscreen attached to the system, which is not a Teach Pendant and does not have a USB port.
It occurs to me that I may be able to jury-rig a USB connection, as the Touchscreen is using a USB port which I could attach a splitter to. But since we can’t use USB sticks without a lot of red tape, I’d still prefer to upgrade the Polyscope version through sftp/ssh or something like that.
That’s an interesting setup. I was about to say you could wire a USB extension to somewhere more accessible, but if you’re not allowed to USB drives it won’t do much good.
I’m afraid I don’t know of a way to update the controller through a network connection. I doubt it’s possible, but maybe someone else knows something.
Just to finish up this post:
In the end I used a USB stick to update the arm, using a USB splitter is provide enough ports. Later updates (I think I tried 5.11) need to write to the USB stick, so I was not able to use a company-provided USB stick as in our infrastructure the USB sticks are only write-able by certain devices.
So i have had similar usb restrictions before, and found a great loophole.
A small travel router Glnet or TPLink with a USB port. When you connect to the network, and plug in a USB it shows up as a network drive.