best scara robot for programing with G-code, or x,y coordinates....

[Revcam_Bob]

Is there one brand that excells over the others for ease of programing with x,y coordinates, arc moves etc.
I would like to consider using a scara to do laser cutting, and trying to find out if they are suited for this, and how difficult the programing would be.

Thanks!

[TygerDawg]

some good candidates (my opinion) to investigate:

Yamaha
SCARA and linear axis modules
good controller for interpolated linear and 3D circular moves
strong language with coordinate transformation functions, either pendant-programming or PC-programming

Adept Technology
same with their V+ language and SCARA bots and linear modules

Staubli has very powerful VAL3 language, but their SCARA bots are limited in size, meant for use in assembly ops

Is there one brand that is better?  Only a rigorous dimensional path accuracy test will tell you this for certain, and don't confuse "repeatability" with "path accuracy".

[Ztek]

One bad thing about Adept in this case is that they do not have a circular motion command in V+ (at least not what I have found). There is no problem to write a subprogram that does a circular interpolation consisting of short linear elements, but I think it will affect the accuracy or motion speed a lot at laser cutting.

For all other aspects of this, V+ would work fine. I have done a lot of similar projects when I teached robotics at a industry school some years ago, but then vi used a small milling tool to cut with. In this case we were cutting that slow that there where no problems with short linear increments in the circles.

[Jim C]

With VAL3, Staubli does have circular moves, but even with the new TS SCARA arms, the payload is limited to 8 kg. We have used them occasionally for trajectory type applications as well and assembly or load / unload. I recently helped a customer with an application where the tool was a print head and the arm was moving it along various trajectories to print images on the part.

[TygerDawg]

I forgot to mention EPSON is worth looking into also.

[gianne]

I think you need a scara robot that allows circular moves, but you also need a software that take in input the g-code and translate it in robot language.
These robots are suitable for teaching programming but programming with x,y,z coordinates require a lot of time.

gianne.