Universal Robot
Some of you may already know about Universal Robot. But at a glance, robotic is one of interesting field to work and there are many models are being used in industry. ABB, Robotiq, Epson and Locus are name few. However, I had an opportunity to work on Universal Robot programming and this post is about it.
Universal Robot is one of safe and smoother robotic arm built for industry collaboration. It was founded in 2005 as a result of join research. Primary target for small and medium businesses. There are several version available on this arm base on weight that arm can hold at a time UR3, UR5, UR10, UR16 and UR+.
It comes with several equipment and parts.
URScript – It’s a functional programming language specifically develope for this robot and robot can understand command are being executed using URScript.
Poly-scope – Where user can see the robot health, I/O status and many more configuration.
Teach Panel – Where you can teach robot arm to do what ever you want. This device uses Linux ubunto and main program was written in Java Swing. There are two version of them.
New Version 
Old Version
Free hand – In teach panel there is button to release all lock in robot arm and you can easily move the arm to get x, y and z coordinate.
Program Tree – It comes with poly scope where you can add node to move robot hand one position to another. After program one scenario, you can save the structure for later use.
URCap – Where you can develop small plugin to add more functionality onto it. Main programming language is Java Swing and you can follow the API documentation for more information.
Daemon – URCap supports to add background services such as xmlrpc, robotic monitoring which can be accessed from URScript.
Control Box – Its just a computer packed in small box. All the magic happen inside this.
External Connectivity
- It supports MODBUS protocol out of the box and there is MODBUS Slave inbuilt to control robot arm.
- It has one Ethernet with RJ45 to connect network.
- I/O connectors comes with 9 Inputs and 9 Outputs. there are 2 of them analog in each.
Overall view of the connectivities
Some Useful links
Main WebSite – https://www.universal-robots.com
GitHub for sample URCap – https://github.com/UniversalRobots
Forum to ask any questions – https://www.universal-robots.com/how-tos-and-faqs/how-to/
