Develop with cobot

A cobot from Universal Robots is a 6-axis articulated robotic arm, but it is also a control box for connecting equipment, and a teach pendant that includes a graphical user interface for easy setup, configuration and programming.

A cobot is everything you need to develop your first application. There is even a simulated cobot (URSim) available for download. Use it if you don’t have access to a cobot, if you are on the road or if you simply want to develop something from your desk.

You don’t have to “develop for the cobot” using a lot of complicated tools. You can “develop with the cobot” and this is the easiest way to get started.

If you have ever developed software for a computer, you probably used whatever computer that was available, without thinking too much about selecting the right computer for the software you were about to develop. Don’t think like that when developing with a cobot.

Developing a cobot application is a combination of selecting, configuring and developing both hardware and software. If you are stuck solving a problem with software, you can often benefit from rethinking your hardware configuration or how you integrate with a machine. If the hardware mounted on or around your cobot is hard to change, it is often faster to find a software solution to make things work.

We recommend adopting an approach to cobot development that is incremental and has a focus on both hardware and software. There might be expections to this rule. However, if you are building your first cobot application, I’d claim that it’s almost always the shortest path to an easy victory.

When developing your first cobot application, it’s easy to overthink how much you need to develop. Many cobot applications are built with machine, parts and other components that were already there before the robot.

A great example is simple machine tending applications. Many successful cobot applications are built next to a CNC machine, a plastic moulding machine or some other kind of machine that was already there before the cobot.

We recommend building your first cobot application by tackling a problem that a human can already do, and we recommend solving it with as little development as possible. When you have something working, you can always add more things to make your application faster or to solve a bigger part of the problem you have at hand.

We know that it is not always obvious what is easy and what is difficult but try your best to keep things simple. If you are stuck, follow the example of others, or get in touch with someone that has more experience.