Robots Applications

Robots Applications

St-Robotics - http://strobotics.com/index.htm

With over 20 years experience, ST aims to provide robots that are affordable, easy to set up and use and easily programmed by any individual regardless of experience. STrobotics provides free and unlimited support throughout the learning curve. STrobotics equally aim to provide a low cost solution to experienced users for a diverse range of advanced or complex tasks.

RoboForth (developed on WIN32forth) is not just another robot software. It is a completely different paradigm. Judging from users feedback we believe it is the best robot software on the planet, by far the easiest to use and the fastest to learn.

Once you have the robot set up and switched on you can immediately communicate with the robot through a 'command console'. You can now type any command in the robot's 'dictionary' for an instant response, for example

TELL ELBOW 9000 MOVE

and the elbow axis moves immediately.

TEACH, GRIP, ON/OFF, SPEED, RUN and many more words of this nature enable you to immediately operate the arm or the gripper or input/output and thus build up confidence that what you are programming is going to work. It's a building block approach, gaining confidence at each step. RobWin project manager organises and saves your work.

Normally Cartesian coordinates are used rather than joint counts. There are commands for this or you can use drop down menus and dialog boxes in RobWin to position the robot at chosen Cartesian coordinates.

Further dialog boxes allow you to create named positions (places) or lists of positions (routes) for path following or creation of matrices.

For example a word might be defined using a PLACE named JIG and a matrix route named TRAY:

: GETPART

TRAY INTO

GRIP

UP

JIG

UNGRIP

WITHDRAW

;

Because Forth and Roboforth are stack oriented the position within the TRAY is given on the stack just before the command, for example

5 GETPART

will get a part from position 5 of the TRAY and put into the JIG

This may be typed as a command into the communications window, or sent from a supervisor, which computes the position number, or further compiled into an even higher level definition for example a loop that works through the whole tray.

Extensive input-output is also provided, which is easily programmed and integrated with robot motion, for example suppose a pump were connected to parallel port PA on bit 5. You could add a definition thus:

: PUMP PA 5 ;

You can then control the pump with simple PUMP ON and PUMP OFF. This could then be included in your higher level definition.

And maybe you want to only do this on a signal from a sensor connected to port PB bit 7:

: SENSOR PB 7 ;

: GETPART

SENSOR 1 WAIT

TRAY INTO

GRIP

UP

JIG

UNGRIP

WITHDRAW

PUMP ON

5000 MSECS

PUMP OFF

;