Well, here's a funny.
Thanks to the quarantine, I'm trying to support a proposal request remotely. The customer wants certain upgrades made to their robots.
Unfortunately, they can't tell me anything about these robots (not even if they're KRC2s or KRC4s). The only data they've been able to provide so far is the robot serial numbers.
(note, I'm not bashing on the customer here -- they're probably shutdown and working remotely as well, so it's not like they can have someone just walk over to the robots and look at the labels)
So, I'm going to try contacting KUKA tech support with the serial numbers and see what I can find out. But it made me wonder: is there any data "encoded" in the serial numbers that might indicate the generation, model, etc?
I tried running a mass search of the hundreds (thousands?) of KRC backups I have, going back 25+ years, but quickly found that there's no obvious numerical sequence to the serial numbers -- there are KRC2-generation robots that have serial numbers far higher (by 200k) than KRC4-gen robots that are ten years younger. So just looking at the number's magnitude doesn't tell me anything about the age.