Creating a real time light drawing application

pollux

Dear reader,

I'm looking into the possibilities to create a real time drawing application. I'm going to attach

an LED (or some other light) to the tcp of a ABB IRB 140, in a dark room and record the 

light in a custom application that grabs images from a webcam. This will result in drawings 

that look something like this:

I'm not a experienced RAPID programmer but have plenty of experience in languages like 

C, C++, etc.. And after reading the RAPID manual and playing with Robot Studio I can get around the 

basics for now.  Though because of my lack of experience I want to ask here what kind of options I 

have to create something like this.  It would be ideal (if possible) when the ABB could move to 

target points I send over TCP/IP in real time and that I can work w/o a work object so I can easily

move around in the area that the arm can reach (I don't know yet how to get this area in which 

I can freely move around and if I can get into problems with configurations). 

If possible I would start a listening socket on the controller to which I sent commands from my 

other application that tells the ABB to start moving to make these light paintings. A command could

be something like "move to this point", "turn lamp I/O port high/low" etc.. I'm curious if this approach is 

possible what kind of performance I may get from the ABB. And if I need to think about any memory and/or

performance limitations.

I understand I'm asking a lot, though I hope I can get some more information so I can start working on 

an application using these fantastic robots.

Thanks

pollux