Offsetting TCP of a tool

Robot Controller
1

Hello all,

I’m hoping I can get some help with a project I’m working on. What I need to do is offset the TCP of a tool. I’ve looked through some old threads and can’t find an answer. I have a tool, but the working direction of the tool is not in line with axis six. It is off at roughly 45 degrees. I need to move the tcp along the Z axis (working direction) of the tool, but because it is at an angle to axis 6 of the robot, I can’t simply change the Z value in the tooldata. A move in the Z direction of the tool would end up being a slight change in X, Y, and Z of the tool. How can I figure out what the new values would be? I need to know how to calculate this mathematically. Ultimately I will be building a function/routine to do this calculation on the fly so if there is already a function built that does this arithmetic that would be ideal.

The application that I’m working on is a non-robot version of the MeasureWearL command for measuring the tip wear on weld guns. What I need to be able to do is after I determine how much of the tip has been ground off during dress, say 2mm, I need to be able to update the TCP of the weld gun by the same 2mm in the Z (working direction) of the gun.

Any help and or ideas are appreciated.

Thanks.

2

Hi,

for the calculation of the tool you can use the function “PoseMult”.

You have to use the pose from the orginal tool (tFrame) and you define the a new pose which contains the translation and the rotation (quaternion).

See following example to move the TCP in Z-direction:

!pose for the calculation
VAR pose pseFrame:=[[0,0,0],[1,0,0,0]];

!Translation in Z-Direction
VAR nDZ:=20;

!Get the data of the old tool
tNewTool:=tMyTool

!assign translation for z-direction to a pose
pseFrame.trans.z:=nDz;

!Calculate translated tool
tNewTool.tframe:=PoseMult(tMyTool.tframe, pseFrame);

BR

Micky

3

That did it. Thank you.