Hi All,
We are an IT company who provides services to large manufacturing companies. We will be exhibiting at an event soon and would like to demo some of our new software for which we’d think would be great to use a robot to help illustrate this.
The use case that we’d like to show at the event:
A robot is continuously running an automated pattern of actions in repeat - eg move a box from A->B and then from B->A (loop)
The robot will stream operational sensor/activity data to a database X
Our external software will read database X
A user at the event would interfere with the robot at the event, ie to slow it’s movement down temporarily, this will result in a change in the sensor readings written to Database X, which our software would then identify.
We need some advice and guidance on:
Selecting a robot that can easily be programmed to perform some repeatable operations
Can write sensor/operational data out to an easily accessible database or filesystem
Can support being interfered with (eg applying some resistance to movements) without breaking or causing problems
It sounds like you really need a robotic arm with collision detection ("collaborative robotics, or “cobots”).
Inexpensive robot arms don’t have this feature, so you’ll need something more like: robotshop.com/en/st-robotic … t-arm.html robotshop.com/en/st-robotic … t-arm.html
Note that the optional collaborative aspect simply stops the robot (i.e. a safety feature).
Alternatively, you might consider a mobile robot which is following a line. It would be equipped with a distance sensor for “interruption”.
There are some inexpensive line following robots, but you would have some programming to do, especially the database part (not common at all).
If you are looking for an industrial robotic arm that performs a task with collaboration with humans (have collision avoidance capability), you can check the industrial cell that we did in our robotics lab, shown in the following video:
youtu.be/mHhYHzWPqCc
The robot can perform dynamic motions on the fly, as shown in the video youtu.be/DkUY1B1L0Hw
In such a case, KUKA iiwa robot was used in tandem with external sensors, the software used for controlling the robot is the KUKA Sunrise toolbox, it is an open source project and is available in GitHub: github.com/Modi1987/KST-Kuka-Sunrise-Toolbox
Video tutorials on using the software are available in youtube: youtu.be/_yTK0Gi0p3g
You can also use the software to turn KUKA iiwa into a CNC machine.