Desperately need help with positioner

Robot Controller
1

Hello everyone,
I am in desperate need of some help welding on a positioned. The background on the machine is an IRB1400 robot 1999 year model with a positioner on each side of a large mechanical rotary table (station 1 and station 2). I have to weld a collar onto a tube. I have the robot going down to the tube have an arc start command and rotate the positioner to complete the weld all the way around. However the positioner will only travel at one speed which is too fast for the weld I am trying to achieve. It is my understanding that I need to create a work object and attach it to the positioner so it will regulate its speed. That is where I am having the trouble. I have calibrated my positioner with the robots TCP under service, base frame, station2 and the 4 point method. I marked a point on my positioner and recorded the point as point 1, rotated the positioner 60 deg. brought the robots tcp to that point and recorded as point 2, rotated to 120 degrees and recorded then rotated 180 deg and recorded that point. When I wrote the program for the positioner move I had the work object as object station2 as I am on station 2. However I still wasn’t able to regulate my weld speed from the weld data. If I create a work object I can regulate speed but I get coordinated motion and the robot will move with the positioner. I have been told I need to attach the work object to my positioner but am unsure how to do that. I am in desperate need of help.

Thanks in advance.

2

It doesn’t seem correct at first, but you need to be in coordinated motion to get the speed of rotation controlled correctly by the welding data. If you’re not in coordinated motion, the tool isn’t actually moving at all (according to the robot controller) so rotation speed is not controlled.

It uses the TCP distance from the center of rotation (positioner work object) to determine the radius to use to determine rotation speed.

It sounds like you are basically trying to keep the torch still (in space, not in the workobject) and rotate the part. The easiest way to program this is to set the intial position and then change out of the rotator work object, rotate the positioner to 2nd position (robot should now stay still) then change back into the workobject and record your 2nd point in program (and repeat depending on how many points around the circle you want).

As long as the center of the your positioner and TCP are calibrated correctly the rotator speed should operate according to your welding data.