this is a teach pendant, and traditionally, it’s how you teach a robot arm to do something. it’s awkward. two of the problems with programming robotsthe traditional way are that you need to tell it exactly whatyou want it to do,
3d printing companies in california, point to point. the other is that the robot assumes that nothingchanges. you just manually drive the tip of the robot to where you know you need it to go
and then hit ‘record,’ and remember thatpoint, then you drive it over to the other placeand hit ‘record,’ and remember that point, and then, when youplay, it goes from one point to the next. and it can do that over, and over, and over again. in the event that there is some error or somethingmoves, the robot has no way of knowing that. the robot will still go exactly where youtold it to go the first time, and that can result in a crash, or breakingsomething,
or injuring a person. it’s just like anycomputer. it will do exactly what you ask it to do, even if that's not what you meant! in the early days of computers, writing code generally meant using what’scalled 'assembly language'. you would have to literally tell the processor to move things from one memory address toanother, or to tweak some values, or to change specific pixels on the screen.
like giving instructions to this arm, you would be telling the chip every singlething that it had to do. as time moved on, programmers got higher levellanguages. write some words and some brackets, the system works out the boring details foryou. if you’ve ever worked with a spreadsheet,then that counts. writing a formula in excel, that's enough. in the end, sure, it all gets converted toassembly language. for most programmers, they never even haveto think about it.
the team here at autodesk's pier 9 in sanfrancisco are working on more or less the same thing, just for making physical things. basically, the biggest robot that we havein the lab, which we call ‘ash,’ is essentially abig, robotic 3d printer that's printing in stainlesssteel. we have a mig welder that is depositing stainlesssteel onto a metal plate. by activating the mig welder while movingthe robot, we’re building a weld bead, and then we’re building beads on top ofeach other.
you would typically use welding to stitchtwo pieces of metal together. what we’re doing is using the same technology, but stacking the metal on top in order to produce a separate piece of finishedmaterial. now, ultimately, the result is the same. the motors in the robot arm are told, “movethis way.†it’s just that human’s original instructionsare a bit more abstract, and they're filtered through another coupleof layers. using a teach pendant would be pretty impracticalfor these complex curves.
normal 3d printers do basically 2â½d. they go to an x and a y, and then up and down. this robot can point in various directions. the robot needs to know not only where itis, but how it should point when it gets there. we give it a piece of geometry, and the software figures out the instructionsset for the robot that will result in a print, that is whatwe want. one of the things we’re developing is aclosed loop feedback system,
where the robot is actually aware of whatit’s doing. before it completely fails a print, it’s keeping track of the quality of theprint that it’s doing. it will actually correct, reprogram itselfin real time, in order to avoid an actual failure. what we’re working on is a vision system, where between vision and a couple of othersensors, we can monitor and supervise the status ofthe prints. if the welder runs out of wire, or if somethingelse happens,
the robot would traditionally have no wayof knowing. now, the robot can know that. not all the robot’s movements are beingdirectly controlled by a person. if it goes wrong, it’s a bit different than just having an error message pop up. this arm here weighs two tonnes, and when it wants to, it moves fast. the only reason i'm allowed this close isbecause i'm literally holding the emergency stop buttonin my hand,
just in case. our robot currently has no way of sensingus. what currently happens is when a person that shouldn’t be near a robotgets close to the robot, you shut everything down. it would be great, and we’re interestedin a future where the robot can know that person is there, with vision or some other kinds of sensing, and then actively avoid that person, and continue doing what it’s doing.
self driving cars, hospital heart monitors, basically everything electronic: ultimately, the code in it is just 1s and 0s. the more levels of abstraction between theprogrammer and the bare metal, the easier it is to write code, but when something goes wrong, fixing it might be out of your hands. thank you very much to all the team at autodesk,
and to their applied research lab,
here at pier 9 in san francisco. go and check out their youtube channel, or pull down the description for some linksto see the amazing projects they're working on.
