Hello,
I get an old industrial robot arm. Does someone knows a possibility (Cam-Software or similar) and a
controller (Mach, Linux) to work with robot arm. 3d-printing or milling?
Hans,
Most industrial robot manufacturers have seen fit to concoct their own proprietary code to run their robots, so they don't read g-code. There is however a bit of software that converts g-code to output the code specific to the brand. I've used IRBCAM to convert g-code to Rapid which is native to ABB robots and it works very well. My workflow was; Rhino/RhinoCam g-code to IRBCAM to Rapid to run an ABB 6400R robot as a CNC for milling wood. Support from the developer in Norway is great and it got the gob done.
Hello Marv,
my robot arm is "naked", without servo drives and controller. I will look for servo drives with step and direction input and a controller like Mach, Linux or similar..
I look for a software for this configuration.
Thanks
Hans
Hans,
I don't know enough about Mach 3 (or other control systems), but there is a fundamental difference between conventional CNCs and robots. Conventional systems employ linear movement with their primary axis while robots use rotational movement. The calculations for coordinating movement are fundamentally different. I don't want to kill your enthusiasm for this project, but you might save yourself some headaches by finding a control made by the same manufacture as the robot.
I have used Mach3 to build Plasma tables, and Motoman robots with their NX100 controllers for welding applications.
My feedback is that Mach3 is not stable or robust, and is good for CNC machines on a budget, but not robot.
The Motoman robots don't operate on G codes, it runs purely on servo encoder positions, in my case 7 separate servo encoder orientation. They are two different systems.
Motoman sells their own software which converts G-Code to the robot movement in terms of encoder locations, but I can't imagine it being very good, as the robots need proper calibration for accuracy and there are too many variables and the unknowns (the arm lengths from servo to servo). When you program the robots manually it keeps hitting an error point where the arm tries to twist itself from too many servo numbers, i think they call it singularity or something, like dividing 0.
Cam for robot?
Reply with Quote
