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Alternatives to RWS

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mkatliar
mkatliar ✭
edited February 2021 in Developer Tools
Is there an alternative to RWS which can perform the same set of basic tasks (start/stop RAPID program, get/set robot targets, IOs, variables etc.), but is less expensive in terms of communication overhead?
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  • Nils Olofsson
    Nils Olofsson admin
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    PC SDK or any of the OPC servers can do these things. What is you problem with overhead? are the data transfers to slow?

    —
    Nils Olofsson
    PC Software Support Engineer

  • mkatliar
    mkatliar ✭
    edited February 2021
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    @NilsOlofsson yes. Below is my benchmark of typical RWS requests to the robot:
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    Benchmark                  Time             CPU   Iterations
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    BM_getIoSignals         20.2 ms         1.62 ms          452
    BM_getIoSignal          2.21 ms        0.199 ms         3546
    BM_setIoSignal          2.07 ms        0.090 ms         7509
    BM_getJointTarget       2.44 ms        0.286 ms         2668
    BM_getRobTarget         2.73 ms        0.379 ms         1000 

    Things like getting/setting an IO or getting joint/TCP position take ~2-3ms. And getting all IO values takes 20ms, which is really a lot (and we don't have lots of IOs).

    Can you tell me more about PC SDK and OPC servers? What communication protocol do they use?
  • Nils Olofsson
    Nils Olofsson admin
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    PC SDK as well as the OPC servers along with their manuals are available at https://developercenter.robotstudio.com/ 
    PC SDK mainly uses the ROB API to communicate with the controller, but for some requests it will use the RWS API.
    The ROB API uses TCP/IP.
    The OPC servers are built using PC SDK

    —
    Nils Olofsson
    PC Software Support Engineer

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