Auto Backward Exit

    Fanuc has a newer option called Auto Backward Exit, it is pretty much what the name suggests, it helps the robot automatically back out of wherever it is. I had thought it would just keep track of what P/PRs it had moved through and then it would move backward through those positions. From what I'm reading in the manual the robot just records the actual path it traveled, you just tell it when and how much of the path to record. It then travels back to wherever you established as the starting point. I initially saw this as something to be used almost exclusively for recovery, but in the manual they show it being used as part of a normal program as a way to exit the machine in the TP program. I'm just curious about how people are using this option, how easy it is to setup, and what the people who have actually used it, what they thought of it.

    We've installed it on our last five and so far it's "ok". It records a given length of travel and will follow that path back to the start of recording and will even record jog motion. Our initial thought was that this would make recovery a lot easier. In hindsight it's probably is better suited for certain applications than other. For me, I had to record segments of the total path (i.e. up to but not including the drop point in a machine) and monitor when I could use ABE and when I couldn't. Long story short, I still had to write the standard recovery routines but now with logic for ABE. Our other engineer abandoned using it on a toploader gantry for this reason. The setup is simple, config it in controlled start and use macro calls to stop/pause/start recording. We'll probably wait to see if it evolves before using it again.

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