Adding External Axis to UP6 / XRC Robot

I have seen one post about this topic. Robotdoc said that it wasn't trivial to accomplish adding an external axis. I would like to do this anyhow of course. I have reached out to motoman on their support site already about it. They haven't yet replied - maybe they will soon (but has been a few days so far)

Right now I have two XRC controls, and two UP6 manipulators. One of my XRC boxes is setup to operate two robots, or was at some point in the past. I am wondering about which board(s) i need to have installed to be able to control an external axis.

I have a linear rail + linear motor setup that I intend to mount my UP6 robot onto. This is right now controlled with a 3rd party servo amp / not anything to do with the motoman XRC. So, there may be options about how to do it. It could be that the external axis only executes indexer type movements, or if integrated fully with the XRC it could do sync'd movements and controllable from the teach pendant. the later is highly desirable.

My linear stage setup uses anorad linear motors, and a renishaw rgs 20um type linear encoder w/rgh22 digital encoder. it has two limit switches (also sensed by the rgh) and a ref mark. there's no need to drive the linear motor coil with high currents - it can move slowly. my application is machine tending of multiple cnc milling tools using right now 1 robot, hence the linear motors track.

any info would be helpful. i know it involves motoman proprietary passwords and I am not asking for that information - i'll get it from motoman when it becomes necessary.

what I do need to know is about which hardware I need installed in the XRC, and any other noteworthy information about carrying out the installation would be very helpful.

thanks for the info, i have been working on contacting yaskawa. they did reply finally, but have not since i gave them the details of my robots / linear motors.

the control cabinet that i have was used for multiple robots, so hopefully it has a bunch of servo packs in it already. I assume the servo packs are located behind some sheet metal in the xrc cabinet - as they're not visible when you open the door as far as i can see. also it seems like the wires that feed the manipulator are thin gauge - its anecdotal seeing how the robot works great - but it seems to me there'd be some heavier gauge wires somewhere. any advice on what to go look for in my xrc cabinets to see if i have the correct parts already?

Yaskawa's official position is that there is no way to communicate directly with a non-yaskawa motor or motor controller for closed loop control. They did say that I could use it as an indexer where the robot requests a position on it's I/O, then my external controller will handle the movements.

Any assistance on how to do this the best way would be greatly appreciated. I do have a nice external control, the ACS SPiiPlus which has several ways to get data in/out of it so pretty much any interface should do the trick, including modbus, serial, ethercat...

any good ways to output a position programmatically using inform II?

should it be hooked up to the CPU card? or the TP serial line comms connector?

what i'll do is have a digital readout for my linear scale, i'll move the robot to the position that I want, read the number, and type that into my program on the UP6 while teaching. with the correct I/O, boolean type 'move, im done moving' commands, and the ability to send serial position data out to my external box, the indexer version should work just fine (its just not quite as fancy as simultaneous movements).

here's some update on my external axis install:

i had a better experience with motoman support by now - they're basically willing to give whatever they possibly can as long as it is safe, and as long as it doesn't get into engineering time - understandable, and they're reputation w/me has improved greatly.

about the external axis though, i will have to use it as an indexer only. to accomplish this i will be putting an XFB01B devicenet card in my xrc control. over devicenet you can transmit the state of the robot's I/O only - there is no way to send position data or anything else but I/O on/off status.

that being said you could put together some kind of binary numeric values transfer system using ladder logic and the large number of I/O bits to for bytes and words. I'm not sure if this will be necessary for me or not - it would be nice to program things of numerical value in and out of the robot, such as a shift value for use with a vision system, or an axis value for my external axis.

the next challenge / set of choices to make for me is how to get devicenet talking to my linear motor control box, which can speak ethercat, and also modbus. i am considering doing it with an allen bradley PLC / controlLogix rack. that's expensive. another option may be to decode and encode the messages using an arduino or something similar to that.

I have aquired:

WRCF01, external axis board to put on top of my WRCA board

anyone know about which servopack would be appropriate for a linear motor external axis? the motor is just a 3ph ac motor. so it should be the same as any brushless dc motor amplifier.

the encoder is quadrature w/index. its all super standard stuff.

max bus voltage is 350V, max current is 10A - these are the motor specs. so thats 3.5kW peak, but really its going to operated at like 1 to 2 kW.

Quote from potis

you have bought the board of aditional external axis and you want the servopack to drive a motor that is not yaskawa? you have it wrong. everything must me yaskawa in order to control it from the robot. the servopack depends from the yaskawa motor that you will use (robot motor not simple servo motor)
if you want to drive a simple motor just connect its drive to I/O of the robot and control it through the program

i appreciate your response, but about the motors, yaskawa servo motors are not different than any other servo motor. its a motor of any type / lucky me its 3ph brushless since thats the same as my linear motor / and an encoder.

that is it. any other equipment mounted to it like brakes, and gear boxes isn't relevant.

now, if i do have some learning to do in that maybe yaskawa transmits their encoder data as some other format back to the control other than a quadrature signal - this is relevant information.

the other difference that is possible is if they go and use some crazy 17 phase drive signal on a 51 pole magnet - i have some learning to do there as well. i do have a spare U axis motor - it has a 6 pin connector to the motor portion of the assembley. it must be 3 phases, 1 ground, brake, and likely brake ret. so that kinda puts us back in the territory where any yaskawa servo pack is going to drive my non-yaskawwa linear motor. its just a matter of knowing the power output of certain servopacks, and whether or not it would exceed the max bus voltage allowed for my motor.

it may also be worth noting that i have nothing against yaskawa sigma motors - i just already own these anorad linear motors. linear motors are not cheap, and the availability of used ones is very low. additionally from the look of it, the ironless core linear motors from yaskawa appear to manufactured under patent license from anorad - fyi they look exactly like the anorad units. and seeing how its fairly new tech, i bet anorad owns the sh* out of that IP still.

about encoders, its probably safe to say that renishaw is more or less the only game in town for optical linear encoders, them or heidenhain.

so with all that being said, why don't i start over.

'I have a yaskawa ironless core linear motor set that i want to hook up to my wrcf01, does anyone know which servopack would be the best choice to operate it?'

looks like the relevant servopacks are:

jusp-ws10ab (??a, probably 600v)
jusp-ws15ab (50a, 600v)
jusp-ws30ab (100a, 600v)

there must be some parameters that need to be set to choose the max current and max v allowed for certain motors

Quote from Robodoc

Mflux_gamblej,

You are still not listening to what people are telling you. Motoman told you that you can not control a non Yaskawa Robot motor with a robot controller. You admit you have read posts (from me) say it's not possible. Roboprof told you you need an external servo pack for an XRC. Potis told you "everything must be Yaskawa" but you still continue down this path of self destruction.

Here it is in a nut shell. Yes all servo motors are the same (or work on the same principle), however, what is different is the number of poles in the motors and the encoder that tells the controller the positional data. Yaskawa has Drives and Robotics. Two divisions. They do not talk to each other. You cannot take an Yaskawa drive motor and connect it to a robot and you cannot take a robot motor and connect it to a Yaskawa drive. The encoder for the robot motor is unique to Yaskawa robots. The robot encoder has a special communication protocol that will only talk to the robot servo system. When you add an axis to a Yaskawa robot you must pick from a list the converter, amp and motor you are using. At startup the communication protocol checks to make sure this is what is connected. If you do not have the same amp, converter, and motor you will get alarms at startup.

Thanks for the straight info. It sounds like a battle that could be won despite the protocols, but its not one I want at this moment. I'll continue down the path of comms and my own control box for the linear motor.

I've had equal resistance from those in the know regarding comms. There are options that I am preparing to dig into:

1.) i have a devicenet card - its not so great because its just I/O and cannot transmit numbers unless you're a computing genius and use the i/o status' to make bytes, words, doubles, etc. (there's only 112 i.o available though....) that'd be a huge project and its probably not worth it?

2.) RS232 @ 9600 baud - despite reading that you cannot communicate with robots via rs232 to do anything useful (only xfer programs and at that only using yaskawa pc software thats $$ and probably not supported for my xrc era anymore), the manual for rs232 describes in refreshing detail how to communicate with the robot over rs232 including i/o status, encoder positions, transfer of numeric variables, external control of the robot. is this some add-on option that you have to unlock or what? I'm waiting on a long null modem db9 to come in to test this out / plan to put a db9 bulkhead on the side of my xrc, and do some comms using the db9 that is on the XCP01 cpu. ultimately this would speak to a microcontroller which would then speak ethernet/ip to my other devices

3.) Ethernet - buy the necessary boards to do ethernet out of the cpu rack using XCP02, and XIF02 - there isn't so clear documentation of what can be communicated using ethernet. this would be ideal for me because pretty much all the automation gear that I have can speak ethernet ip / ethercat

using RS232, or Ethernet/IP, a labview dashboard could be constructed in the matter of a couple days to show status of important I/O, alarms, positions, and whatever. sounds super useful for developing things like external axis, tool changers, and vision systems right?

i have a big allen bradley plc rack that can speak any of these field bus languages, but its unclear to me that a PLC should be required to send a position out of the robot using inform II during playback.

any suggestions about whats best?

Quote from potis

i would say that you have only 2 options.

1) have an external axis with its own servo drive and controll it through the i/o. you are limited because you must use predefined positions and you not make use of smov commands on the robot so no synchro

2) buy a motor with servo pack and connection from yaskawa for the robot. all advantages of this is easy to understood as you can do smov commands, see the value live inside the controller, use position variables for your axis etc that will make your life easier to prgram.

all other options that you are mentioning do not worth spending money. you will end up with cards, less things that you are able to do and if you consider the time you have spended for sure at the end is more expensive.

the real question is what do you want to do with your ext. axis. few predefined positions or freedom of having it to the kinematic of the robot with all the advantages?

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the application is machine tending. the external axis will move the robot base back and forth from one machine, to another machine, to a parts pick up and drop off area, and to a hand changing station. it could be used as an indexer for sure. i just worry that its not so easy to program in that I won't have 100% assurance that a situation wont arise where the external axis gets commanded to move when the robot is not in the necessary position to avoid a collision with surrounding equipment.

on using a yaskawa motor that is setup for robots, it needs to be a linear motor / can't be anything else in this case. so, if there even is a robot encoder comms enabled linear motor for sale, it is probably the licensed IP form anorad, and some encoder (most likely renishaw) + a converter module to read the encoder and speak to the robot over modbus or whatever their language is. i haven't seen the hardware available on the used market at all, and yaskawa hasn't offered up an parts for sale new to me on this subject.

the best bet for safety in my case may be an extensive rs232 or ethernet setup where i transmit and recieve a lot of different data to make some redundancies and safety checks before moving my external axis using my 3rd party control box.

anyone know what the purpose of this module is:

JZRCR-XFL03-1 PC Board Filter

looks like you hook up PG's to it, and it hooks up to the WRCF

I found a yaskawa sigma linear motor coil which was used with a renishaw RGH22B (analog) encoder read head which gives sin cos output instead of the one I had which does digital a+/-, b+/-, etc. it also has a ref+/- output.

I have also seen yaskawa serial converters that go with it such as JZDP-D005. I believe as robotdoc mentioned - this is for yaskawa drives, not motoman comms compatible. does anyone know which serial converter is to be used to hook up to the motoman filter box on CN7,8,9 for the external axis input?

should it be relevant to anyone working on an external axis, here is the motors list from the XRC control:

*listing is from xrc control group, base axis setup menu
motor P/N:
SGDMH-45A2B-YR1*
SGM-01AW**
SGM-02AW**
SGM-04AW**
SGM-04AWG**B
SGM-A5AWHG1*
SGMAH-04A1A-YR1*
SGMAH-A5A1A-YR1*
SGMAH-A5A1A-YR2*
SGMD-22AWA-YR1*
SGMD-32AWA-YR1*
SGMD-40AWA-YR1*
SGMD-45AWB-YR1*
SGMDG-22A2A-YR1*
SGMDH-06A2A-YR1*
SGMDH-06A2A-YR2*
SGMDH-12A2A-YR1*
SGMDH-32A2A-YR1
SGMDH-45A2A-Y21*
SGMG-05AWBBF
SGMG-13AWA-YR1*
SGMG-20AWABF
SGMG-30AWA***
SGMG-30AWABF
SGMG-75AWA-YR1*
SGMGH-13A2A-YR1*
SGMGH-13A2A-YR2*
SGMGH-14A2A-YR1*
SGMGH-30A2A-YR1*
SGMGH-30A2A-YR2*
SGMGH-44A2A-YR1*
SGMGH-55A2A-YR1*
SGMGH-75A2A-YR1*
SGMP-01AW-YR2*
SGMP-02AW-YR1*
SGMP-02AWHG1*
SGMP-08AW-YR1*
SGMP-08AW-YR3*
SGMP-15AW-YR1*
SGMP-15AWHG12
SGMPH-01A1-YR2*
SGMPH-01A1A-YR1*
SGMPH-02A1A-YR1*
SGMPH-02A1A-YR2*
SGMPH-02A1A-YR3*
SGMPH-04A1A-YR1*
SGMPH-04A1A-YR3*
SGMPH-08A1A-YR1*
SGMPH-08A1E-HG1*
SGMPH-15A1A-YR1*
SGMS-10AWABF
TS5643N121
USADED-13YRW1*
USADED-22YRW1*
USADED-32YRW1*
USADED-40YRW1*
USADED-45YRW1*
USAREM-01YRW1*
USASEM-02YRW1*
USASEM-05YRW1*
USASEM-08YRW1*
USASEM-18YRW1*

you could find these yourself by reading the maint. manual / going to the maint. mode by pressing top menu during power on, etc. i took the time to write them in excel / though it'd paste them here.

for the most part they appear to be the typical robot manipulator motors, and some other external axis looking motors too. all are ac servo with encoders, none appear to be linear motors. mind you these are a listing from an XRC control of 2002 vintange.

what i have learned is that motoman is so tight lipped about their parameters, passwords, and whatever that there is no way to integrate a motoman robot onto a custom linear motors base. if you truley needed to do this, you would pay a very large fee to motoman and they would send a japanese technician / engineer to your building and he would have the available parameters list to tune the drive. the parameters list just does not exist outside of motoman in japan, period. i guess thats there way of imposing the japanese robotics industry dominance.

i have many brands and types of automation gear and machinery - every single one of them gives full parameter listings and all details of machine construction. not motoman.

so maybe the message is, beware.. it only escalates on the newer products about the lack of customizability. (without paying probably hundreds of thousands for someone to change some numbers for a few hours)

all that doom and gloom stated, it is possible to add motors, etc. within the pool of motors listed on the control which are all regular ac servos . what a shame.

Quote from Robodoc

You were told. You just don't listen.

not in plain language. i continued to get more and more documents and info from motoman, and from this forum the more i kept asking.