AUTO / MAN mode best practices

AlexRad

Hello,

  I am putting together a IRB 140 robot system with an indexing table.Everything is going to be controlled from a control panel, a PLC being master and the robot slave. There are two operating modes: AUTOMATIC  and MANUAL (control panel switch).
  Each of the two procedures (AUTO / MAN) works fine on its own, however I am having trouble coding them to work together.Specifically, I have tried putting them both in an IF ELSE statement based on the control panel switch, and everything enclosed in a WHILE TRUE loop.This approach is not satisfactory since control does not transfer right away between the two modes when I switch from one to the other, but rather happens after while (there are a lot of things happening in each mode).
  I am not experienced in this kind of design and I would like to know if there are some sort of thumb rules for this(as I imagine most cells working auto and manual mode)...e.g should I run each mode in a trap routine instead of a regular procedure?
  
Thanks
Alex

lemster68

Can you post some of your code?

soup

Are you okay with losing your program pointer when someone switches modes or does it need to be retained?