Posts by nutcase511

Has anybody ever tested/tried storing a FANUC unplugged for relatively long periods of time?

We have a little machine with an LR-Mate in it (Mate iB cabinet) that only gets used a few times per year.

We are just about to finish our service order run with that machine, and it's about to go to storage for ~3-4 months until the next order. I just had to replace all the batteries in the robot base and CPU, was wondering if people know approximately how long the batteries will save everything for, or if I should plan to run an extension cord to the machine while it's in storage to keep the robot powered up and not drain the batteries.

Short bit of background - I had to re-master this robot and touch-up like 12 positions and re-teach several iRVision programs to get this production run going. It took ~2 days because it was originally mastered weird because the enclosure it's in won't let the robot be easily Zero Mastered. And there is no pre-made touchoff point for fixture position mastering. I would REALLY like to not have to do that again the next time we plug it in to run production. I am planning to take a good image of the robot parked at 90, 0, 0, 0, 90, 0 when we shut it down to go to storage though.

Also, make sure you don't have anything active/enabled in the Program Adjust menu

I'm sure it's possible, but I would highly recommend only swapping robots if the controllers are the same. The I/O, settings, System Variables all are likely different between two different controller versions, and you're likely to run into a bunch of miscellaneous problems.

It's fun enough swapping robot mechanical units when the controllers are identical, it would probably turn into a 2+ week project if the controllers are different.

You'll need the CORE software to swap them around as well.

I know this is an old post, so mostly documenting this in case someone besides me comes across it.

If you're greasing any FANUC robot, I suggest getting a hold of the Mechanical Unit Maintenance Manual for each robot from FANUC. Sometimes you have to have some joints at a certain angle when replacing the grease.

Long story short, you need to remove the grease "Exit" bolt and then you can start pumping (very slowly) NEW VIGO RE0 or MOLYWHITE RE00 grease into the joint. Pump until clean, new grease is coming out (or there is very little gray/black crud in the grease coming out). I would personally rather was a little new grease than leave contaminants and crud in the grease joint.

After the grease has been added, you should jog the robot around, as specified in the manual. Essentially you need to jog enough to get it to "burp" any air bubbles out of the grease and make sure the grease pocket is full of new, clean grease.

On bigger robots, like R2000 and M900's, you will use VIGO RE0 (looks like Honey) for all joints, but the balancer will be greased with a different grease, I believe it's any grade 2 grease.

Cheers.

Since I'm good at "kicking the hornets nest", I would honestly suggest FANUC's for your application. If you contact FANUC and let them know what you're doing, I would place a pretty large wager that they would give you a good discount on the simulation software, as well as robots and other accessories you need. This is because typically the first robot system that people program tends to be what they lean towards. (Hence, why I pretty strongly prefer FANUC over all others even though I've used KUKA, ABB, Comau, Wittmann, Ranger, Yaskawa, MotoMan, and Universal).

The problem you may have is voltage. FANUC LR-Mate robots can be run on 230V AC single-phase (two 110V circuits stacked together), but most decent industrial robots will require 400V+ to operate efficiently.

The other reason I would suggest FANUC is because programming them is relatively simple. Using the Teach Pendant, there are only so many options for basic programming. Joint move to this position. Linear move to this position. Turn on this Digital Output.

Just my opinion.

Quote from aishpd

Wondering if anyone out there is using (or has used) or knows about any condition monitoring solution of robots. We have large population of Fanuc robots at our plant to maintain. Please share some best practice(s) we can follow to keep our robot's uptime as large as possible.

Thanks!

I know this is a very old thread. But if you haven't seen it yet, FANUC now has ZDT (Zero Down Time). It's a program, that if your robots are running essentially the exact same movement pattern all day, records the "master known" amount of power consumption for each axis as the robot does its normal routine. Then every so often as it runs this routine, it sends an alarm if the power required exceeds the normal amount. This will greatly help you predict if a motor or gearbox is starting to fail, or if perhaps the grease isn't lubricating properly. It will even tell you which motor is causing the problem.

Update for everyone:

Under System Variables, $MAX_NUM_PRT was set to 256, I changed to 512.

Once I changed the first set of EthernetIP to range 1-15, then I was able to add more parts of the range.

Numerous reboots required to update everything.

Because they had previously used a lot of the I/O for UOP signals and status Outputs (product dropped, robot running, crash detected, etc), I had to separate the second Input card to range 200-215.

A little convoluted, but I thought I'd give an update. Everything working now (though a little messy)

Good morning everyone,

I have (hopefully) a stupid question.

We bought a used robot, an M-410iC/140HL that was previously used to palletize boxes.

We are using it for the same purpose, but I have a challenge setting up the I/O.

Previously, they used EthernetIP to communicate with the robot/cell/PLC, and I'm removing all other devices except the robot for the current application. Inputs and Outputs 1-256 are assigned for EthernetIP.

For whatever reason, I cannot get the robot to let me add another range of inputs or outputs as Digital I/O into the mapping.

I've tried doing a controlled start, numerous power-cycles.

My main question - is there a system variable to set the number of I/O showing in the mapping scheme? I'm wondering if they limited that to 256, so that no other parts of the range show up. If I delete the EthernetIP from the mapping, will that allow me to then add in the digital I/O? I'm planning to use a FANUC backplane and 16-point digital Input and Output cards inside of the controller to do things like turn vacuum pump on and off for the EOAT suction cups, receive UOP start/reset signals from a control box located away from the robot, and an auxiliary signal set from some safety scanners (I can handle the external e-stops, fence open signals)

Please help! Hopefully I'm just overlooking something stupid, but can't find any good info in my manuals.

-nutcase511

I know this is an old thread, but I thought I would comment. I have the same problem coming up. I'm very familiar with FANUC 6-axis programming, and cannot find any decent info on the differences in programming a Genkotsu (Delta) M-2iA/6HL robot that we just purchased. I'm assuming I'll be relatively OK at it since it's FANUC and they do a pretty good job with guides built into a lot of the software, but would like more info. Does X, Y, Z act the same? Do the various move types, offsets, etc work the same way?

We're planning to use the Genkotsu to vision inspect container caps as they come in a conveyor to look for defects, and pick off the "good" ones to another conveyor.

If anybody has any good info, it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

I've had the same issues on an R-2000iB/210F that I installed. It was used, so very likely the brakes could be worn out. What I usually do is switch to T1 and jog to either the current or previous point in the program using forward/reverse buttons in T1. Then, throw it back in auto and hit cycle start. I usually get the pop-up, and hit continue, hit cycle start again and it takes off. The tolerance warning is based on the DCS principle and having the robot verify it's physical vs programmed positions (or along a path). If the position deviates too much, like if your robot is in the middle of a Linear move at high speed with CNT100 and you're within the "rounding off" section of the move, it frequently thinks it's too far off of the programmed path. Throwing it in T1 and jogging back to the programmed path will allow you to run, but you'll still get the warning. That warning is there for a reason, and I have no plans to disable mine at all. (But I may bump up the tolerance allowance).

Not sure if this helps anyone or not, just my observation and experience so far.

I would go under Utilities, Frame Offset, and copy your program to a new one using the new frame. When asked to convert positions say Yes. I'm not super familiar with problems from the tool frame standpoint but in user frames I've experienced this problem. If a position was taught in one set of coordinates (UF0, UT1, etc), and you're trying to go to the "same position" but now using UF1, UT1 or UT2, it's probably going to give errors.

I would give that a shot, but just a guess.

I believe you could try "moving" files on a computer from one backup to another, and try to restore it. I've never done this, so I'm not sure what the results would be. (IE Moving the SRAM00.IMG and SRAM01.IMG from Folder X to Folder Y).

As far as I have ever done though, you either restore an entire image, or you restore just the files from "All of Above Backup". Force of habit - before doing any "major" program changes (logic, variable, math changes) I always do an image backup. If I'm just doing program positions/touchups I'll just do an "All of Above" backup. WELL WORTH the extra 5-10 minutes of your time.

From my past experience -

Write a quick "grease work in" program to run in T1 during the greasing process. Make sure you move all of the joints the recommended amounts from the manual, I usually run this program at 100% of T1 speed for about 5 minutes. Put the caps in.

Another (dumb) question - is your payload set correctly on the robot? You'll get collision detect alarms all day long if you have nothing on the wrist and your robot thinks it should have 165 KG of payload (the default from the factory is 100% of it's rating). If you can't get the payload info perfectly from SolidWorks or a calculator, weigh it at least or best guess at least. I worked at an automotive manufacturer as a Robot Maintenance specialist and maintenance supervisor. After we changed one of the car lines over to a new model, one of our biggest robots (M900iA-600L) kept giving us collision detect alarms. So to temporarily make it through to the end of shift we bumped the sensitivity down. Then we re-ran the "automatic payload calculator" between shifts, and found out the Payload Info was off by about 75 KG, and the center of mass was off by about 300mm. Once that was done, set the sensitivity back to normal, no more issues.

I've found the usefulness of Jog Frames to be very few and far between. I did have one recently, oddly enough.

I'm making router cuts in a vertically angled face of a plastic part (boat helm) - two adjoining faces are at basically the same vertical angle, but rotated slightly around world Z to be at just a hair different angles. (I would guess about 5º). When I had to make adjustments to a few of the cut points, I was in a UF that I created for the center face. Made a quick jog frame on each adjoining face to adjust the positions quick. I should never really need to use those two as user frames, and you only get 9 User Frames to mess with. This robot runs 5 different part families, with different faces and angles on them. So I wanted to conserve the User frames for the main programs.

Quote from kevilay

Thank you very much for this response. What is a start distance schedule? Where would I find this? I do have the thickness in the pressure table. I was trying to use this for dressing, but also for a cap changer. I have to close on the changer at a set pressure.

Thanks

Kevilay,

Did you give up on this or are you still working on it? I used to work at an FCA facility as a robot "specialist" in the body shop where we have hundreds of 7th axis spot welder robots, exactly what you have described. You will have a pressure data table, a distance/thickness table, and probably a power/voltage table - some weld controllers handle all of this stuff for you and so the robot just has a schedule - "weld type 1" or "weld type 12" as an example would tell the weld controller what type of weld - voltage/power and duration of weld, and the robot would control how much it closed the gun, and how much force to put on the sheet metal before firing the weld. The pressure table should be accessible through Menu, Data, Pressure. Tip dress & change info is also set up in there I think hit F1 (type) then pick the other schedules. Start distance schedule should be inside of the weld utilities on the teach pendant also. That is used to open the gun to a certain distance - in the automotive world they open the gun as little as possible to get the gun in position, and then close it on the sheet metal to fire the weld. (Some robot cells would have each robot doing more than 30 welds in like 45 seconds or less). Hopefully this helps. Keep in mind that some robots need to access the weld schedule that's inside of the weld controller - this is usually done through "Browser" and browsing the weld controller's web page like accessing a website)

1 - at Chrysler where I used to work, we trimmed the wire to length every cycle with a little pneumatic snipper with the robot. Once your wire is the same length every time, I would re-master it with the proper length wire.

2 - you're probably going to want to search closer to the weld than the white dot shown in the picture. Not 100% sure what scale is, but I would probably want to search within an inch of where the weld is going to go.

3 - are you searching at both the beginning and the end of the weld? I would search in "X & Z" at both the start and end of the weld positions.

4 - do you have weaving on or off? Automatic seam follow?

Hope this helps some.

Hi everyone,

This isn't really a question, just a little blurb to help someone in case they run into what I just ran into.

I have an R-2000iB/210-F with an R-30iA controller, and was trying to call a motion routine program within another motion routine program. Couldn't figure out why, but I kept getting "INTP-222" and "INTP-288" errors, which don't really have a solution in the error code manual. I talked to a friend, and I had to go to the details page for each of the programs the error was occuring for, and hit "Next", then "Enable" for Handling, then "End.". Since I had never seen this before I was quite baffled. FANUC tech support didn't help much either.

Just an FYI.

Hi everyone!

I have an R-2000iB/210F robot that I need to offset a bunch of positions "in bulk" if that's possible (only to certain lines of code). I have over 250 lines of code, over 220 positions. I don't want to go through the program and add "OFFSET PR[13]" etc. to all of the lines if possible. Does anyone know if this is possible? (I'm only offsetting in one direction, X)

The premise:

I am using a laser sensor to measure how wide a part is. My EOAT consists of a die grinder with a 1/4" router bit, that I am using to cut openings and holes in parts with. I have 4 "sections" of cuts - 4 openings/patterns to cut of various complicated shapes. Based on the overall part width change, each of those 4 sections needs to be offset by a different amount (only in X), and the relationship between points has to stay the same (can't change opening size, just need to move it side-to-side based on part size changes.)

It's a huge pain, but every part shrinks differently, so I have to accommodate that shrink change with every cycle, otherwise I know I could just use program shift for a quick shift.

Thanks in advance!

Quote from 98rzvr6

so I am making sure that my PR are the same and the tool frame is the correct one. I think the singularity point is correct, I am getting elbow or wrist singularity. I'm trying to figure out what that exactly means and how to avoid it altogether cause I know if I move it just a little bit in the right spot, it works like it should.

If you're near singularity just jog J5 a few degrees. If possible, and necessary, use Joint moves when you're close to singularity instead of linear moves. Also if I read your original post correct, it sounds like you're trying to use a fixed PR to accommodate a part that is never in the same spot or rotation? If that's the case you might need to use some sensors or a camera, or use Skip condition search with a sensor on the robot to determine part orientation and location. I am using a Keyence LR-Z CMOS photo eye sensor to determine part location and orientation right now on a project. It works pretty well aside from adding cycle time to search for the part.

I know this thread is old, but I was looking into something similar myself. I know with Inputs you can change the speed automatically using the speed select option. You get two inputs, so 4 combinations of on/off. You can assign a speed percentage to each of those 4 combinations. I am using it currently to automatically slow my robot to 10% speed when an area scanner's "warning zone" is violated, along with turning on a warning light and siren. I believe you could simply turn an input/output on and use that with speed select to slow the speed down. Use interconnect to connect the needed input and output together. I haven't done this personally, but I'm fairly certain it would work.