Robots
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Robots are nice and remove a lot of the dirt work as they are already adjusted to move at their max speed given a certain specs on weight into the clamping system but, they are not precise (therefore the offline trajectory/points programming is always something that is half backed) and when you want to program them you need to go deep into the specific software the manufacturer gives the operator/engineer that need to program it. This means that you have a subset of variables and functions that are somehow limited, depending on the brand you use bad documented and with a bad technical support too. Anyway, the best thing of programming robots and special machines is to "see" your work moving something real. Being a roboticist is usually easy if your environment has companies that are working on that field, of course, studying at the university some robotics help to get in touch with companies that are interested in that world. Anyway, there is something you have to be aware of: there are plenty of companies that search for "robot programmers" which at the end of the day means somebody to move the robot at different positions to store trajectories. Coming from the IT world the nice job is the one that implies maths, 3D trigonometry... to make special and nice things with those arms. When I do need people in my department I usually search for guys/gals who have studied something related to robotics in the University, but even if they have not, I want people with IT knowledge... It's easier to explain what a piston is than what a pointer is... But this is also an important factor when searching for people: I've seen plenty of programmers that have made all their programming job thinking the mechanics are instantaneous and of course this won't work... When programming with sensors and actuators you need to change a little bit the way of working and getting used to that can take time.
[www.tamautomation.com] | Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing. [YouTube channel]
"...they are not precise ..." Consider the Motoman HP20-6, within it's range of motion repeatability is +-.06MM, industrial robots - love'em. If you want to be involved with robotics, vision, sensors and creating the software to drive and integrate them, get into manufacturing. regs ron o.
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More and more (and also perhaps because I follow some twitterer about the topic) I learn about the increasingly amazing abilities of today robots. They seem to get better ever faster (no surprise here, classical technology exponential curve). At any rate I keep wondering: how come that me, a professional developer, hasn't been exposed to robot programming? For how long is it going to be the exclusive realm of a select few? Will it ever democratize? Or how to become a roboticist? Where are there jobs for such?
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When my better half bought an iRobot Roomba, it came with an invitation to develop new programs for it. It's fun to watch one of these when you first get it, in part because there are just a few easily identified floor coverage algorithms. And they're way different than anything I expected. Maybe all it can be programmed for is movement patterns, but for 400 USD it might be fun and you would see some tangible results.
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"...they are not precise ..." Consider the Motoman HP20-6, within it's range of motion repeatability is +-.06MM, industrial robots - love'em. If you want to be involved with robotics, vision, sensors and creating the software to drive and integrate them, get into manufacturing. regs ron o.
Hello bojammis, See my other answer here[^]. Precision is not the same than repeatability. A lot of years ago I learned that the hard way. And then, it comes when the repeatability sphere changes it's physical position depending on the motors temperature... X| I've still never used Motoman, but I've used ABB and KUKA extensively (since 1999) and now I've started using Stäubli (because of a customer preference). Soon it is possible I'll have a Motoman to play with... let's see if they work as well as I heard and let me cross fingers to pray for a software base that looks like the one installed in ABB. +-0.06 is not precise by any means, any of our tailor made CNC machines is at least 10 times better in precision than that. Don't misunderstand me, I love robots: they are really flexible and allow making things that are impossible or super expensive if you have to do them in a CNC/PLC tailor made machine. We've made very special things with them, extensive math, processes that recalculate the trajectories at runtime, calibrating robots, artificial vision, force control sensors, offline programming... we even have some patents related to robotics... Feel free to take a look at our web page (see my signature) and some videos in our Youtube channel. Which sector are you in? which kind of machines do you create at your company? Best regards! :thumbsup:
[www.tamautomation.com] | Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing. [YouTube channel]
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When my better half bought an iRobot Roomba, it came with an invitation to develop new programs for it. It's fun to watch one of these when you first get it, in part because there are just a few easily identified floor coverage algorithms. And they're way different than anything I expected. Maybe all it can be programmed for is movement patterns, but for 400 USD it might be fun and you would see some tangible results.
coolies!
All in one Menu-Ribbon Bar DirectX for WinRT/C# since 2013! Taking over the world since 1371!
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You might want to check out Instructables. There you can do a search on Robots, Raspberry PI, Audrino, Intel Edison, and (my fav) Segway. This site is perfect for DIYers. Truly a great place to start fishing for ideas and learning how other people make things. Hope it helps.
Phil Delay
interesting web site!...
All in one Menu-Ribbon Bar DirectX for WinRT/C# since 2013! Taking over the world since 1371!
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I think one aspect has been the prohibitive costs of classic industrial robots. Think about all the amazing things programmers could do if we just had the ability to play with these! When it comes to more android like robots I think one aspect is because 1, people think its super complicated and 2, you need to work with a lot of hardware. You need components and then you need multiple parts to be able to build a more advanced robot, and to be able to do something you need to construct and program all these. Say you just want to build a simple walker you need to invest a lot of time to succeed here, then when you want to do something more you may have to reevaluate your design. But I think its easier if you take another approach, build more drone like robots with specific purposes. I for one would love to delve in to drone/robot development but I lack the time and focus at the moment. Got too many pure software projects I wish to do first. Sometime I plan on learning enough circuitry and electronics to be able to put together my own drones because I got a lot of ideas I wish to test out. One thing I wish to try is to use sensors/cameras to read the surrounding, input this in a 3d engine to create a virtual representation of the area and basically just use game ai and pathfinding to navigate around. Sadly there are too many things I lack knowledge wise atm to test my designs even thou I'm sure they would work if done correctly. :((
While actual industrial robots have always been costly (and still are - though if you have access to 3-phase power and a big enough garage, there are many used full-sized industrial robot arms being sold for less than the price of a new car, which is really something) - you have always been able to buy trainer arms for much less (generally well under $5k USD). Think devices like the TeachMover, Rhino Robotics arms, and the Armdroid (and clones). Still too expensive? Back in the day - even today - it was a bit of coin. Back then - the cheapest you could do (aside from a complete homebrew - there was one or two of those published in Byte Magazine in the 70s and 80s) was a Tomy/Radio Shack Armatron robot arm conversion. That had to be one of the most hacked on robot toys of the 1980s - besides the venerable Milton Bradley Big Trak! Today - kids (and adults!) have their choice of low-cost robot arms to play with; most use cheap RC servos for the actuators, and generally have a cost under $500.00 USD or so. Machine vision hardware and software are both low cost (for experimentation at least - if you want industrial quality, expect to pay some big-bucks for the camera(s) - still, the software remains free, using OpenCV). All in all - today's a great time to jump into robotics as a hobby - hardware and software have never been cheaper - even if you are purchasing everything. If you are going the DIY route, it's even cheaper! There's a plethora of options for your platforms (land, sea, and air!) and controllers/logic, not to mention software and software frameworks: If you want hard-core research level - go with ROS; if you're just a hobbyist, there's NodeBots (NodeJS) as well as GoBots (Golang). If Windows is more your style, there's plenty of frameworks there, too. Or - grab the bull by the horns and roll your own!
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:-D This is a quite typical misconception on the robotics field: robots have a good repeatability but an awful precision. After years of working with them I've learnt to expect a 0,3mm precision in all the working envelope as the best case scenario and only in certain robot arms (the smallest ones). And of course after a very expensive recalibration process that can take a couple of days per robot. You can easily see Absolut/High accuracy robot variants in all the robot brands out there and in those "special" much more precise systems they are offering +-1mm of precision. when you move a robot to a certain position and store the point you are simply correcting the precision error without even noticing it, but don't try to copy one program from one robot to another one... even in the same conditions the program will be executed in a different position... A CNC machine is always more precise than a robot (of course if it has been constructed as it should), but the way the motors and the physical conception of a robot is made it is easy to understand the big kind of errors a robot have.
[www.tamautomation.com] | Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing. [YouTube channel]
That's good info and a point well made. But "...but don't try to copy one program from one robot to another one... " doesn't hold for many cases, especially when the robot is integrated with sensory and other features that give it the ability to correct where needed. With that environment in place, I can move the software and its specific operating scripts from one unit to another and get the needed performance. Glad you mentioned CNC machinery (a large part of automation and AI that is not in the forefront of the IT news).
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Hello bojammis, See my other answer here[^]. Precision is not the same than repeatability. A lot of years ago I learned that the hard way. And then, it comes when the repeatability sphere changes it's physical position depending on the motors temperature... X| I've still never used Motoman, but I've used ABB and KUKA extensively (since 1999) and now I've started using Stäubli (because of a customer preference). Soon it is possible I'll have a Motoman to play with... let's see if they work as well as I heard and let me cross fingers to pray for a software base that looks like the one installed in ABB. +-0.06 is not precise by any means, any of our tailor made CNC machines is at least 10 times better in precision than that. Don't misunderstand me, I love robots: they are really flexible and allow making things that are impossible or super expensive if you have to do them in a CNC/PLC tailor made machine. We've made very special things with them, extensive math, processes that recalculate the trajectories at runtime, calibrating robots, artificial vision, force control sensors, offline programming... we even have some patents related to robotics... Feel free to take a look at our web page (see my signature) and some videos in our Youtube channel. Which sector are you in? which kind of machines do you create at your company? Best regards! :thumbsup:
[www.tamautomation.com] | Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing. [YouTube channel]
I'm making this comment after I replied to the (answer)link you sent me so it may seem they are out of sync. I worked with CNC equipment for 25 years. Very use to the idea of +=.0002 inch accuracy with .00004 repeatability. I don't meet many people who have had the experience and back ground that you sport( in automation). My experience with CNC equipment was end user at the time. Now I work with automation for micro circuits(chips). I write software that would manage/coordinate a number of robots (in atmosphere and in high vacuum) along with heaters, gas analyzers, cryogenic doDads, digital IO devices, devices that communicate using sockets, the list goes on. These are machine specific to the needs of the company. But it's great fun.
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That's good info and a point well made. But "...but don't try to copy one program from one robot to another one... " doesn't hold for many cases, especially when the robot is integrated with sensory and other features that give it the ability to correct where needed. With that environment in place, I can move the software and its specific operating scripts from one unit to another and get the needed performance. Glad you mentioned CNC machinery (a large part of automation and AI that is not in the forefront of the IT news).
It all depends on your needs of course, usually this is not needed and sensors can help to correct the robot programs. In our case (we always make strange things) we need to allow the end-user to program the trajectories in order to be able to create different programs depending on the different parts the machine will have to grind or polish. When this happens, given the fact the robot precision errors are not constant in position nor orientation, then we need to go the re-calibration way. If you take a look at our EMERALD machine range you'll see why I speak about copying one program from one robot to another one. Anyway, if we forget our strange needs you are right. :thumbsup:
[www.tamautomation.com] | Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing. [YouTube channel]
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I'm making this comment after I replied to the (answer)link you sent me so it may seem they are out of sync. I worked with CNC equipment for 25 years. Very use to the idea of +=.0002 inch accuracy with .00004 repeatability. I don't meet many people who have had the experience and back ground that you sport( in automation). My experience with CNC equipment was end user at the time. Now I work with automation for micro circuits(chips). I write software that would manage/coordinate a number of robots (in atmosphere and in high vacuum) along with heaters, gas analyzers, cryogenic doDads, digital IO devices, devices that communicate using sockets, the list goes on. These are machine specific to the needs of the company. But it's great fun.
bojammis wrote:
But it's great fun.
Indeed it sounds fun, once you enter the physical world it's difficult to go back to program "normal" programs. :cool:
[www.tamautomation.com] | Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing. [YouTube channel]
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Interesting answer! Gonna investigate those topics! :) Are you working with robots today?
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Found this Robotics course[^] from Stanford, covering the topics I mentioned.
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Found this Robotics course[^] from Stanford, covering the topics I mentioned.
Great find! :P
All in one Menu-Ribbon Bar DirectX for WinRT/C# since 2013! Taking over the world since 1371!