Work Home Position

The Work Home Position can be used as a simplified “auto home routine”, however there are other uses for this that will be detailed below. It is important to know that when using this function, the robot will take a joint move from where it currently sits in space directly to the Work Home Position and does not account for any obstacles that may be in the way. With the YRC1000 controller the speed of this motion is controlled by parameter S1CxG56 units :0.01%. By default, the Work Home Position is set with all 0’s for each axis.

The advantage of the Work Home Position is that the robot can be commanded to move there from an external device. This is done by mapping one of your devices allocated External Input address to #40170 (Specific Input #0129). STR #20030 / OUT #40170 Another advantage is that when creating/modifying the work home position you are also creating Interference Cube 64 (Specific Output #120) at the same time. On the YRC1000, the size of the cube is determined by parameter S3C1097. This means you can also monitor if the robot is at the safe starting position from an external device with another simple ladder modification. STR #50157 / OUT #30030

Registering the Work Home Position

1. Jog the robot to your established safe starting position.
2. Select [ROBOT] / [WORK HOME POS]
3. With servos on, press modify then enter on the keypad. Your new work home position is now registered. Cube 64 has also just been created.

Let’s see how it works

We will run a simple routine and then trigger the input to send the robot to the Work Home Position

Tips and other ways to use Work Home Position

Most cells have obstacles and peripheral equipment the robot works around, and it can be worrisome to trust an operator to use this function without crashing the robot. In these cases, more advanced “Auto Home Routines” are required. However, you can instead use this Work Home Position as an operator/maintenance access position. For example, if your robot’s Home position is often in the way during change overs or daily cell cleaning, create the work home position in an area so that the robot is out of the way, yet still in a safe path to travel from the home position to the work home position. This gives you the ability to move the robot out of the way by toggling an input from the HMI rather than an operator jogging the robot to an unsafe position.

While modifying the work home position does create/modify cube 64, creating and changing cube 64 does not overwrite the work home position. You can create a work home position and then clear the cube 64 data and the robot will still move to the stored work home position when triggered. You can then use cube 64 for other means, this can get tricky as any modification of the work home position will again overwrite the data in Cube 64.