Advice on FANUC CR-35iA and fanuc package
Hello,
Our research group is considering to purchase a FANUC CR-35iA collaborative robot and we have been looking into FANUC software to determine if it suits our needs. We are planning to use fanuc package to communicate with the robot but we are also wondering if there are any limitations with it. It seems like FANUC does not publicly distribute their documentation so we will be grateful if you can give us your opinion on the questions below.
- We found out that it is possible to update the joint and cartesian position values by updating corresponding registers from an external PC. Is updating registers enough to generate motion or will we need to create a KAREL script that will communicate with the external PC? What is the control loop frequency?
- Is it possible to send joint or cartesian velocities from an external PC?
- Will purchasing the robotic arm and its control box be sufficient to control the robot via TCP/IP? Is there any particular hardware/software (eg. PCDK) combination that we need to request from FANUC?
- Will the collaborative features of the robot (eg. collision detection) be active when we are controlling the robot using the fanuc package?
- Is there any documentation that you can share with us which can give us a better understanding of how FANUC's software works?
Thanks for your time and your contribution to the community. We are looking forward to hearing your comments.
I use a LRMate 200ID Fanuc robot, if you are planning to couple it with ROS tightly, I don't suggest you FANUC robots, really. Consider something else that respects and recognizes ROS. I don't know what controller you are going to use, the latest ROS driver available for FANUC controllers , AFAIK is fanuc_driver_exp. Which works OK but have certain limitations(see issues on the page). And for TCP/IP, you will need external software (
R648
if I remember correctly) to be installed to controller.