External position control D series controller

[jonfarrugia]

I have very limited experience using Kawasaki controller. I will be working on a project which will require a Kawasaki robot to cut profiles out of steel using a plasma cutter. For example, The operator will place an I beam in the cell and the robot will need to cut around the profile of the entire I-beam. Cutting out the profile is no big deal, however, there are close to 400 difference sized I beams each containing slightly different dimensions.
What I'd like to do is create a generic program and have an external PC send the dimensions to the robot.
Has anyone attempted with before or know how to do something like that. Any advice would be helpful!

[SkyeFire]

Well, you can set up TCP/IP communications between the robot and a PC, assuming that you have the I/O board that supports that.  Or you could probably use the serial port.

Having the PC direct the robot's motions in realtime, though, is going to be a really major deal.  I'm not entirely sure it's possible with a Kawasaki.  What you could do, I think, is establish a "skeleton" program in the robot -- The first cut always runs from Point A to Point B, the second cut runs from Point C to Point D, etc.  And at the start of the program, have the robot communicate with the PC and get the actual XYZOAT coordinates for all of those points.  If the I-beams are all as similar as you suggest, then the same basic "skeleton" program should work for all of them, with the PC-sent coords for the actual cut endpoints doing the fine-tuning.

[Kwak]

We have done a project exactly the same as what you are describing. What is your location, maybe we can sit down for a chat sometime.

MJC

[t2o]

How are you controlling the robot, serial via a pc or remote I/O with a plc?

AS. has some very powerful [base] and [tool] commands that will do what you are asking. You must use transformation locations and write an AS. program to dump your offsets into either the base or the tool. The trick is getting the offset to the robot and the easiest way to do this is via remote I/O but the hardware is costly unless you already have plc control. The other option is turn ON host communication and write and serial comm task to read the numbers or string from a PC or some sort of basic module.



If the basic path of the robot is always going to be the same and just the (Z) dimension is variable then why not try an [xmove]. We use xmove to load parts from racks all the time and NO external control is needed, just a good proximity detector.