Modelling a 12-joint robot!

We have an interesting situation here where a small robot has been bolted onto the end of a larger robot - giving a 12-jont long-reach megga-supple robot. To add to the fun, it's sitting on a rail!!

Has anyone built such a beast before, or know how to?

I'm wondering if it's possible to latch one robot onto the end of another and use parameters of both robots to build an overall motion path. Alternatively, as it's a welding robot and doesn't actually need to transport anything, I could maybe do it in animator; but I suspect that getting realistic movement across all 12 joints would be difficult.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Kenny

I opted to try to build and animate the double robot but Flexsim keeps crashing when I add new objects to the animator.

It doesn't seem to be at any particular spot and there's no error messages that I can see, other than the Windows message "Flexsim Engine has stopped working".

Hello Kenny,

I managed to add a second robot to the first by adding objects via the animation creator one by one. Flexsim did crash though when I tried the 'easy' way by copying all robot objects via the tree in the visualization/drawsurrogate node. But this was just a start, then I tried to model the movements by modifing the arm movement with the cpp functions, though I did not got this to work yet and did not have time to look any further (I was trying to solve your problem outside working hours as a hobby...). When I have more time I will try to take a look again, but it should be possible to add the second robot.

Esther

Thanks Esther, i hope you enjoyed the challenge.

I finally managed to get all shapes aligned in the animator (it kept crashing) but couldn't get the animation going - something in there must be clashing with something else because it crashed then too (although it may be my PC). To be honest, I REALLY didn't want to attempt to manage 12 joints individually over a complex set of movements; the robot was to simulate welding along each seam of a car.

Kris and I managed to get something working (OK, he managed; I watched and encouraged) using two standard robots, rather than the animator.

The child robot was dropped onto the parent and each is individually managed using its own parameter options. The main robot has use of the blue Planning Object, and the child is controlled by the sliders in the geometry tab. There's some custom coding to pull it all together.

Once it works properly, and if Kris agrees, we may be able to publish it.

Kenny

BTW, this is probably too late, but I think the reason your model is crashing is because the robot's end effector has its own drawsurrogate attribute that points back up to the main robot, so that flowitems are drawn as if they are inside the robot end effector. If you copy one robot's drawsurrogate structure, then paste that into the end effector of another robot, the copied end effector's draw surrogate attribute will reference a path somewhere back up into the drawsurrogate sub-structure, instead of to the main robot. This means that the drawing will get into an infinite loop of drawsurrogates and crash from stack overflow. So if you want to copy/paste, make sure you delete the drawsurrogate of the end-effector before copying. Probably too late anyway, but for what it's worth...