Industrial Robot Arm Update
2,840 views · Published 3 October 2011 · 2:15 · Indexed 9 October 2026
Channel: aonomus · 2011 · Science & Technology
After a few weekends of prodding at the broken robot arm, we have revived it. This video was filmed on Oct 1, 2011. Instead of going out to Nuit Blanche in Toronto, we had our own version of fun. Some history about this robot to put it into perspective, the arm itself is from the 1970's, the computer boards were upgraded during the 80's, and my friend purchased this recently in 2011 for $500. When we acquired the robot, the main cables between the control cabinet and the arm had been severed by a forklift driver (about 60-100 conductors which had to be spliced one by one), the third axis had been jammed up with water found inside the motor and sensor housing, and otherwise no documentation existed. Within one month we had found almost all documentation available, restored the broken axis, and gained enough understanding about the robot arm to begin the process of modernizing the control software using EMC2. In the previous video, individual control over each axis was possible, however one axis was disabled which prevented homing the robot, using the limit switches for each axis, and from using the computer to translate joystick commands into movement of the robot in 3D space. Now that the robot can be homed, the robot arm can either be controlled in Cartesian coordinate space, or polar coordinate space by moving the end effector and having the arm maintain its position. Keep in mind this was in 1980, so it was quite high-tech. The long term goals are to replace the entire control cabinet with a small roadcase with a replacement switch mode power supply to replace the 600V 3 phase AC power supply, and a modern computer to use for control. After the controls are modernized, the entire mechanics of the arm will be disassembled and repainted to the original gloss orange from ABB, with any worn or broken parts replaced. (And yes, we know the robot arm resembles one from Portal/Portal 2, but we want to restore this to ABB orange!) One extra side note: the robot arm is speed limited to 25% by the control software when under manual control. At full speed the movement can be as fast as a golf club swing, as we found out when some of the sensor wires were not correctly attached. Music: "2.18.05 dai" by BOPD licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution
