ME: How does a robot function as a hand-held measure- ment device? Hunt: The robot is a very accurate and extremely repeatable tool. Imagine a measurement probe mounted onto the robot tooling flange. Remember I said the ro- bot can be made to float, or be compliant in all directions? Well, the robot doesn’t just flop to the ground when it enters that mode, it basically just sits there. With the proper safety precautions in place of course, you could potentially grab hold of the measurement probe, and with robot in tow, move it to a location you want to begin a measurement. Then you just press a button on the tool which tells the robot to store that location, move on to the next, and so forth, each time storing the locations until you’re finished. ME: How do robots deal with that data? Hunt: As you would expect from an industrial robot, and this is espe- cially true with the IRC5 controller, it’s extremely efficient at interpreting coordinate information, and there are a number of functions in the RAPID language that can quickly crunch that data. With a little RAPID programming, it’s no trouble to produce a number of results from those 3D measurements. But that’s not really what our developers had in mind when they developed the SoftMove feature; it was developed for assembly operations, mostly as a way to reduce the cost of tooling and fixturing. By allowing the robot to comply in a well-defined or constrained manner, the robot can sort of feel its way through, allowing the real world to dictate the process instead of brute force trying to get mating parts to mate. ME: Are you seeing increased use of sensor technology for robotic automation? Hunt: Requests from industry for sen- sor technology are increasing so robots have to play nice with these devices,
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both electrically as well as programmatically. The slope of the curve in the demand for sensor technology doesn’t seem to be leveling off any time soon. This means the robot OS and its associated hardware platform must track a similarly sloped
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October 2013 |
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