What Does An Industrial Robot Specialist Do In Work Life?
Industry is growing day by day. This sentence may look very simple but it has many meaning. With Industry 4.0 and IoT, robotic technologies have been gaining more importance. Most production lines need more automation and robots for many reasons. These reasons may be the topic of an another post. Let's go back the subject of this post.
Many people asked me "What do you do in your job?" when we met for the first time. I always try to explain my job in its simplest form if this person don't know anything about industrial robots and programming. I prefer to say robot with "industrial". Because if I say just robots, people think about the robots like cinematographic way. For that I explained "What Is Robot?" in my one of old post. Sometimes high school students asked me the same questions for future career plans. In this way I feel responsible to tell my job fully to be aware of. I decided to gather all of my experiences about this description in one post.
After my graduation, I started as industrial robot programmer at an integrator company, and then I continued to my career at an automation company which was the system integrator of YASKAWA Motoman. At first, I had just known "How to develop a program?" and "What is flow chart?" in addition some low level programming languages such as C family. I didn't know how to program an industrial robot. But some background about low level programming language helped me quickly to learn how can I write industrial robot program shortly. Robot movement principle & motion types, robot axis, cycle time and scenario with PLC were different concepts for me as a freshman in the industry rather than academic life. I started robot programming with ABB Robot firstly and I used KUKA, YASKAWA and FANUC. I can easily say that all of these robot brands have pros and cons side for programmers and 3rd party users but programming concepts are very analogous. You should focus on the algorithm, scenario and step by step programming. (Teach Pendant will be your best friend)
My job description was simply that preparing robot and robotic cell for automatic production. If I listed what are my responsibilities:
1) Checking robot reachability and singularity according to design of the robotic cell for arguing that the robot can perform own process. In simulation platform, deciding "What height of the robot base should be?", "Where we located robot into the robotic cell?", "Does robot gripper exceed maximum payload?". If these questions aren't applied, there may occur time consuming faults because of the design and layout of the robotic cell.
2) Creating flow chart of the program. What costumers want at how much cycle time is required for that? Working with PLC programmer synchronously to dedicate the scenario. Communication protocols must be identified and make a connection with PLC and robot(s)
3) Designing and integration of electric cabinet for robot gripper or external axis. There may be valves, sensors, sliders, motors or tool changers into the robotic cell so there should be junction box for connections.
4) Test the systems in automatic mode of production and preparing educational documents for robot(s) to describe "How to use the robot and all details?" and "How to solve possible problems?".
I would like to define below what you should or shouldn't do for fresh robot programmer. It may help to understand the all concept for this job.
You should:
- Make reading robot documents especially instruction list
- Follow the precautions and safety requirements that explained in the robot documents
- Follow robot forums (such as www.robot-forum.com)
- Watch robot videos for seeing different kind of operations
- Try to understand at least concept of PLC Ladder programming.
- Make many exercises for simulation platform
- Understand communication protocols
- Open and follow new technologies
- Use excel table for Input-Output communication with outer devices such as PLC
- Take backup of the robot(s) program day by day or after every big changes
- Check and test any new or modified program at low speed for at least one full cycle
You shouldn't:
- Ignore safety. Safety must be the first priority.
- Specify the point velocities ignoring cycle time. You should consider efficiency when determining the velocity.
- Make automatic mode tests before completely tested in manual mode.
- Create a program without thinking of PLC Input-Output scenario.
- Create program without defining tool and base(if it is required)
Lastly, I would like to mention about what kind of companies and which departments of these companies.
- Maintenance, R&D and project departments at the manufacturing companies.
- Service or programmer at robot manufacturing companies
- Robot programmer at integrator companies
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