Hello all,
I am new to the forum, so thank you in advance for your help (and patience)! I am not new to robotics but am new to welding/industrial robots. Apologies for the long-winded-ness, but wanted to give the full picture. If I am missing any relevant info (I'm sure I am) please let me know.
We have an IRB1400 with an S4C+ controller, both circa 2003-4, set up as a welder for steel fabrication. Obviously it is an older unit. We recently (last spring) performed a hardware and software upgrade, replacing the CPU and hard drive and dropping on the latest software for that generation unit. This was performed with the regional ABB technician, who was very good but has unfortunately left ABB since then.
We are recently having a strange error with the TCP calibration, which I believe has arisen since the upgrades were performed. We have been having an error where the robot hits the Bullseye mount when performing a manually-initiated TCP Check routine. We discovered that in our more recent backups, the TCP modules were messed up in some way that causes this error to occur. However, if we take an old backup that we know to have a good TCP module, we can pull the TCP module, load that into a recent backup (so that we have all our current programs) and it runs OK - programs work well, and TCP check runs fine. The last time we did this was on Friday. We welded several units, checked the TCP, and it was still good. The robot then ran well for a couple hours on Friday, and a few hours this morning. Our tech made a few changes to the weld program to account for some material changes this morning, and then ran a TCP check again. This time the check failed, with the robot hitting the Bullseye mount. So here we are... My questions at this point are:
- Any thoughts on what could be causing this error?
- Could it be an effect of the manual updates that were made to the weld program?
- It could be that the TCP is fine until we make a change to the program, and that the manual control during the change somehow throws the TCP positioning off, could this make any sense? I can try to confirm this issue by troubleshooting further.
This has happened a few times, but always with other issues or problems happening at the same time, so troubleshooting/tracking has been difficult. Any thoughts or assistance would be greatly appreciated!
Alex