Tried this awsome thing today

[SilentTrigger]

ABB Force Control! It's AWSOME!!

Might not tingle the senses for anyone else but this is for a robot programmer that a long awaited game is for a true gamer!

What am I on about you might ask?

Well Froce Control is a little neat thing that, well sense force. When grinding somthing you just tell the robot to (programing) gind a pice of metal with a sertain force, in other words constantly reacting on the force that the robot is pressing to keep an exact presure to ensure a perfect result.

Can also be used in assembly, for example to assamble a crankshaft in an engine. What a human would do is to wiggle it to as you try to push it in. Thats not possible, or was not possible before force control you had to position it to a hundreds of a millimeter and have a serious jig that keeps it exactly in place. Now the robot with force control just does what a human does as it can now sence like a human.

They've had soft axis for quite some time but it's very limited in use as the whole robot becomes like a lump of yelly. Force Control reacts, soft axis doesn't.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=G1s8teMJyq4

A video of it. What you can do aswell is to grab the gripper and move the robot around with your hand which is awsome.

And this is regarding industrial robot so no one thinks of the man like robots that can feel.

[.Simon.]

At first i thought... wtf is this all about?
But after watching the video i see its quite clever ;P

So i guess the up-side is that you don't put too much pressure on the piece being grinded? Like you say, as a human, you do a little bit at a time.

[SilentTrigger]

Yeah exactly, not too much presute and not too little of a presure. Bad video though as that's speed control rather then force control, but the force control one doesn't show much .