Manual jog during program execution

Superasering

Hello!
I am a mechanical engineering student and right now a few of my colleagues and I are inmidst of project, which consist of programming a drawing routine on an ABB140 robot. The target and the path generation appear to be easy enough, but the other part of the project task, specifically tool and workpiece calibration, appear to be more difficult. Mathematically it is clear how we want to approach the problem; we intend to use a 3-point calibration for the workpiece and a 4-point calibration for the TCP.
The actual problem and the question are: is it possible to include a manual jog input in a RAPID program? Specifically, we intended to let the operator jog the robot to the three points on the workpiece, read their positions, and thus calculate the workpiece position and orientation. After that, the actual code would be executed, depending on the position of the workpiece.
Yet, so far we could not find a solution. Is it possible that the workpiece has to be defined beforehand, or is there a way to implement our general idea of TCP/wp-calibration and the drawing routine in one single program?

Thank you very much in advance, we appreciate any input.

soup

is it possible to include a manual jog input in a RAPID program?

You're looking for "Stop\NoRegain;" -- the \NoRegain option allows RAPID to send the robot to starting position 1, (communicate to the operator what to do, maybe TPWrite something), Stop\NoRegain, the operator jogs to perfect the position, then CJointT and store that position, send the robot to starting position 2, etc., etc., then put all those joint targets into a MToolTCPCalib and you've got a TCP.

lemster68

You could have a loop in which the operator is prompted for how much distance to move in x,y and z.  I think that your biggest challenge is how to do the reorientation necessary to teach the tcp.  Since it is not yet defined, you would have to use tool0, I suppose.  But that would make the orentation of the tool that you are trying to teach difficult.  Of course, you need to do this step first, before the workobject.  That part should be easy after defining a good tcp.