Universal Robot: I/O Registers

Introduction

This article is intended to aid a user of the MachineMetrics platform that wants to monitor an I/O Register on a Universal Robot. This article expects that the user has already undergone the process for adding a new machine to your account. All configuration in this article is conducted through Data Collection described in the machine settings documentation.

The Universal Robot has many I/O Registers natively available to be reported through the RTDE interface, by default they are not registered to be reported to MachineMetrics. A user can define I/O Registers to be reported to MachineMetrics through configuration by adding the appropriate key name to the recipe key in the configuration.

Topics covered in this article

Robot I/O Register Configuration

Registers reported from RTDE on the Universal Robot can be configured in the Data Collection of the Universal Robots machine. These fields can be specified using the recipe section, and one of the following fields specified as a string array consisting of either individual registers, or as a range of registers.

• input_bit_registers

• input_int_registers

• input_double_registers

• output_bit_registers

• output_int_registers

• output_double_registers

Below we see an example where output_int_registers 0 through 10 are all defined directly and output_double_registers defines 0, 1 direcly as individual entries and 2 through 5 are defined as a range of registers. This range expression aids the user in defining many I/O Registers more simply.

In previous examples we have depicted all available register types to aid in clarity of presentation. It is worth noting that it is fully valid to define the recipe keys for only the register types you wish to configure and omit the others, they will default to empty.

Robot I/O Register Data Mapping

After configuring to monitor an I/O Register, they need data mapping to be conducted in App. For more detail on mapping data see Mapping Data (Machine Settings) .