Camera cable

Description

Your robot should be mounted and powered off before attaching the external cable and end effector.

External cables can create risks of entanglement for the operator or interfere with robot operation.

Cables can be damaged by the robot motion and create additional hazards.

Care must be taken when affixing external cables that these risks are mitigated.

  • Restrict range of possible joint movement to prevent damage to the camera cable.
To affix the camera cable

While robot joints can rotate plus and minus 360 degrees from the zero position, this movement will damage the camera cable and in practice is not required in most applications.

 

The safety functions of the robot can be used to limit the motions range of the joint. Refer to the robot User Manual for descriptions of how to use the safety functions.

 

  1. Before affixing the cable, pose the robot to the median position of all movements necessary for your application.
  2. Attach the camera cable to the camera.
  3. Make loose coil around wrist joints of the robot arm. Run the remainder of the cable along the arm.
  4. Use cable straps to fix cable to the upper part of the arm. Make sure that the cable is not under the buckles of the cable straps.
  5. Leave some loose cable between the two tubes of the robot arm and fix the cable to the bottom part of the arm.
  6. Connect the camera cable to compute module.

 
Restricting joint movement

When the camera cable is attached to the robot, you can restrict joint movement. Before continuing you should familiarize yourself with robot Freedrive, refer to the robot User Manual.

 

To restrict joints movement:

  1. In PolyScope open 3D View and Joints tab.

  2. Start the robot arm, unlock the brakes and start Freedrive.

    You may want to move the Freedrive restrictions panel to make joint angles visible.

  3. While in Freedrive, slowly move robot arm from side to side, imitating robot movement in your application.

  4. Observe the camera cable and give cable more slack or reposition cable coils if necessary.

  5. Move robot to most extreme positions of your application and take note of the joint angles for each joint.

  6. Enter these values as Joint Positions in Joint Limits of the Safety settings of your robot.

Read robot User Manual, Safety section on how to enter joint restrictions in PolyScope X.
Testing joint limits

Try to move robot using the Move tab and verify that camera cable is not overtightened or clamped by possible robot movements.