High Pitch noise on CRX series

Hello dear colleagues!

This one goes to the CRX cobot owners or really anyone who ever worked with this thing. We have been owners of a CRX-5iA for about 1 year and a half now, basically, we got ours as soon as it was launched and I can tell that the quality is really bad compared with other Cobots out there and even FANUC's Industrial Robots.

Anyways, one of the many things that bothers me about this robot is the very annoying high-pitch sound it makes whenever the servos are energized. I remember when we first got our brand new CRX and it made this terrible sound as well as some crunchy noises while moving some of the axis (mostly J3), so back then I had it replaced under the warranty.

After a few weeks we got a new robot and for my surprise it had the same crunch noise and the annoying high-pitch, so I kinda made my peace with it and accepted that it is a 'normal behavior' of the robot. Now that over a year has passed I believe people are a little bit more experienced with the robot and can tell me if that is really the case or if they fixed it in later revisions.

Does any of you working with CRX cobots experienced a constant high-pitch noise coming from the robot arm whenever it is on?

Hello pdl , thanks for your input! I have used a few robots as well but nothing close as what this robot does. I used to work at Omron and we had the Articulated Viper, the SCARA eCobra and i4L, the Parallel Quattro and the Cobot TM5 and TM12 and they were very quiet.

Here we also have a FANUC LR Mate 200iD which is also very quiet and has a way better quality.

As I mentioned in the other post, this is the second CRX that we got and they all present the same loud high pitch noise that can be heard from meters away. We are not a production environment so we don't have a bunch of machines making a lot of noise to muffle it but definitely this high-pitch is not the same as other robots.

I attached a sound recording and you can notice that it easily tops the controller fan sound.

Quote from CD12

This could be the servo off time, you can change that so they power down much faster. Look here maybe

Thread

Fanuc Servo off timer

How do i increase the amount of time the robot will sit idle before the servos turn off?

The problem i'm having is that each cycle the robot sits idle waiting for an input from another machine. If it is waiting longer then 20 seconds, the robot takes an extra half a second to start moving once it receives the input, so im presuming the servos are turning off and the delay i caused by them having to turn back on?

gr8nuts69

December 6, 2013 at 5:30 AM

That was a good idea, I enabled the $SV_OFF_ENB so when in idle the robot turns off the servos and the high-pitch noise goes away. That is a good alternative for sure, at least I don't need to press the E-Stop so frequently. Thanks for the suggestion!

Ideally the best case scenario would be a proper servo amplifier tuning to keep it from making this noise...

I would really like to hear from CRX owners if they have the same issue.

Update on the case. After updating to version V9.40/58 the high-pitch noise is now way much more tolerable. Is still present but way less intense when compared to before.

So if anyone is running V9.40/38 or lower and do not wish to use hearing aids in the future, update the cobot ASAP.