Universal Robot: MM UR Cap

Introduction
MachineMetrics has developed a minimal UR Cap supporting Universal Robots e-Series for our partnership with Universal Robots and UR+ certification. The MachineMetrics URCap is not a required component to support a Universal Robot integration.

The UR Cap presents in the URCap installation page a QR code linking to the MachineMetrics knowledge base article for our Universal Robots integration. The URCap also has a toolbar contribution for reporting the current status of the Edge connection.

Topics Covered In This Article

• Installation Contribution
• Toolbar Contribution
  
  • Connection States
  • Timeouts
  • Degraded Connections
  • Multiple Connected Edge Devices

Installation Contribution

The Installation Contribution refers to the GUI presented to the user in MachineMetrics URCap panel of the installation section in Polyscope. Here the user is presented with a QR Code that links to the MachineMetrics knowledgebase.

Toolbar Contribution

The toolbar contribution presents the health of the edge connection to the tablet to inform the user if there is a problem connecting to one or more of the interfaces. The contribution runs a TCP server in the background listening for client connections on port 1936.

Connection States

The toolbar will report one of:

• Connected - All connections are online
• Degraded - 1-2, of the connections is offline
• Disconnected - All connections are offline

The toolbar also informs the user the status of each individual connection.

Important Note: The toolbar does not live update the connection status while opened. The toolbar must be closed and reopened to pull the most recent connection status and redraw the toolbar GUI panel.

Timeouts

If the URCap does not receive a new message from the edge, after 60 seconds it will assume the edge is offline and transition the Edge Connection state to disconnected.

Degraded Connections

It is not uncommon to briefly see degraded connection states, especially on startup. The RTDE connection in particular can sometimes take 20-30s to fully connect especially during a downtime recovery.

If the user is experiencing a prolonged degraded connection, first ensure that the ports to all interfaces on the robot are reachable by the edge.

Connection Interface

As a final recovery method the user can restart the URAdapter to refresh all connections from scratch.

Multiple Connected Edge Devices

The UR Cap can support multiple connected clients. This makes no practical sense and there shouldn't ever be a target deployment that isn't 1:1 between an edge device and a Universal Robot. Regardless, if this does happen by accident, the UR Cap will continue to operate and the edge connection status will be updated according to the most recently reported edge connection status message.