how to remote control KR6 R900 over Ethernet

Hi all

I want to remote control a KR6 R900 from my laptop (Mac OS X). More specifically, I want mount a camera on the robot (connecting to the laptop via a long USB cable), then analyze the images on the laptop, and from this generate the new positions for the arm.

We have a KR C4 compact controller (KSS V8.3). I have connected the laptop and the C4 with an ethernet cable, plugging it into the X66 port of the C4. The KLI port on the C4 is occupied and there's a cable leading inside the case.
Is X66 the correct port for my endeavor?
Pinging between the laptop and the C4 works fine.

Now, I am not clear on how to proceed on the software side either. I have searched the forums, and it seems like there are (at least) 3 options:
- RSI Ethernet, sending binary data (?)
- Ethernet RSI XML, sending commands in XML data packages
- Ethernet KRL, sending KRL commands (?)
Which of these would you recommend, also in terms of available ease of setup, documentation, example programs, etc.? Then, how can I proceed with the setup?

I have also found a couple of open source implementations which would run on the laptop. One example is "KCT", "KUKA Control Toolbox", which would use Matlab. From what I understand, KUKA switched from TCP to UDP as a transmission protocol in a recent version change, meaning that older software like the KCT is not usable anymore. Is this correct?

Thanks a lot!

Quote from SkyeFire

RSI is not what you want, unless you expect to be doing hard-realtime vision corrections at 12ms or better.

EthernetKRL, or EKI, is about the only way to get a KRC4 to talk to a PC directly. The good news there is that from the PC side, it's a simple port-based data transfer, little different from sending data between two PCs, and the EKI installer comes with an example C "server" program that can send/receive data from an EKI process.

Thank you. Indeed, it seems like RSI is overkill for what I want to do, as the timing constraints are much higher, and are only soft constraints.

Quote from panic mode

Well opc server is another option but setup can be challenging, i would probably go with EthernetKRL it seems easier to most people....

I'm checking all the options, thanks. Another option seems to be the open source alternative "JOpenShowVar", which is based on the seemingly-outdated "OpenShowVar". Do you have any experience with it?

To update on this topic, we are now using JOpenShowVar. I have implemented a rather convoluted system which interfaces the JOpenShowVar console application using C++ on the PC side. On the robot side, I have programmed a custom KRL script which listens to different commands from the PC and executes them, using a very simple state machine. I can communicate at around 10 commands / second, which is enough for our purposes.

Sorry, can't share the code.
It is a rather simple system though: Basically, I have a "state" variable that can switch between different states such as "moving", "waiting", "move request", etc. On the PC side, I can update a position variable, then I set the state to "move request". The KRL script running on the robot has a "WAIT FOR STATE <> #WAITING" line. After changing the variable to "move request", it will read the position variable and move to it.