Features and Usage
See how our software makes your UR robot even more powerful and benefit from the award-winning ARTIMINDS RPS. Get to know the highly innovative RPS for very fast and intuitive programming of complex robot tasks, including sensor-adaptive motions. The software may be used both by integrators when building a solution as well as end-users for easy and fast post-installation adaptation.
Flexibility by Sensor-Adaptive Motion
Sensor-adaptive motions are a crucial element for more robust and flexible robot use in many application domains. Currently, classical robot solutions can be derailed by slightest process variances >0.3mm, making complex, specialized hardware engineering necessary or automation even impossible. With sensor-adaptive motions, based on readings from either force-torque sensors, cameras or both, the robot becomes able to deal with process variance in real-time and adapt its motion like a human.
This is crucial when the process exhibits characteristics like:
- Part poses vary and cannot be easily fixed
- Timing of part poses changes in a not easily predictable and controllable manner
- Deformable materials lead to not fully predictable part behavior
- Part wear changes surface properties and geometry
- Part geometry changes in a not fully predictable manner
Sensor-adaptive motions enable a robot to adjust its task execution on-the-fly to occuring variances and ensure execution robustness. Force-torque sensing can be used for contact-based, very precise adaptation, while machine vision is very fast and usable in many contact-less cases. By these means, standard hardware can be used, specialized engineering highly reduced and a system provided, which can be easily recommissioned for other tasks.
Note: for better clarity, these examples are not optimized for speed — execution can be much faster in most instances
Advantages of Intuitive Programming
Even in classical, fixed-trajectory robot tasks, commissioning and task programming can take quite some time and amount for considerable costs. Sensor-adaptive motions represent an even far more complex task type altogether. Thus, a tool is needed for very fast and highly intuitive programming of both classical as well as sensor-adaptive motions and compound tasks. ArtiMinds Robotics provides such a tool with its Robot Programming Suite. This unique, award-winning software, the result of a decade of research, allows non-experts to quickly and intuitively create — drag'n'drop as well as teach by guiding the robot directly by hand — complex, sensor-adaptive robot tasks.
Advantages of inuitive task programming are:
- Much faster initial setup
- Quick adjustments at any time by in-house personnel
- Reduced downtime after errors
- Reduced downtime after process changes, e.g. no customized hardware with long lead-times
With fast, intuitive task programming novel applications with small lot-sizes and thus frequent process changes become economical. Yet, also high-volume installations with infrequent changes can be commissioned and maintained cheaper.
Benefits of Reduced Hardware Engineering
Less hardware engineering for automation work-cells is a crucial step towards more affordable, more flexible automation. While robots basically provide much higher versatility than other automation mechanisms, (too) much hardware engineering around the robot in its work-cell is still typically needed today. By giving the robot much greater task capabilities, ArtiMinds helps to substantially decrease such engineering requirements.
Advantages of less hardware work-cell engineering are:
- Less initial implementation time and effort
- Easier implementation in existing setups due to reduced installation space and constraints
- Easier to adjust later (less hardware re-engineering)
- Greater portion of the work-cell can be reused for other purposes securing initial investment
- More frequent process changes or optimizations supported
In general, less hardware engineering increases flexibility to quickly adapt the solution or repurpose it with less effort and thus time as well as costs.