Can UR robots be mounted on the ceiling?

Catherine_Bernier 2016-10-18

This is a good question since I had to double verify as it looked obvious.

So, yes, you can mount the UR robots on the ceiling and even on the wall. Here is what UR is saying:

Here the mounting of the robot arm can be specified.

This serves two purposes:
1. Making the robot arm look right on the screen.
2. Telling the controller about the direction of gravity.
The controller uses an advanced dynamics model to give the robot arm smooth and precise motions, and to make the robot arm hold itself when in Freedrive mode. For this reason, it is very important that the mounting of the robot arm be set correctly.

WARNING: Failure to set robot arm’s mounting correctly might result in frequent protective stops, and/or a possibility that the robot arm will move when the freedrive button is pressed.

The default is that the robot arm is mounted on a flat table or floor, in which case no change is needed on this screen. However, if the robot arm is ceiling mounted, wall mounted or mounted at an angle, this needs to be adjusted using the push-buttons. The buttons on the right side of the screen are for setting the angle of the robot arm’s mounting. The three top right side buttons set the angle to ceiling (180◦ ), wall (90◦ ), floor (0◦ ). The Tilt buttons can be used to set an arbitrary angle. The buttons on the lower part of the screen are used to rotate the mounting of the robot arm to match the actual mounting.

Did you face any challenges by mounting the robot in different directions?

matthewd92 2016-10-18

The only issue I have had is to make sure that the mounting orientation on the robot matches its physical orientation or you WILL run into protective stop issues because gravity is working in a vector that does not match the vector that the system is calculating.

Tim_Smith 2016-10-19

@Catherine_Bernier @MatThanks for the information in this post! I hadn't thought about mounting the robot on the ceiling, but this could potentially save a lot of floor space. Does the orientation of the robot have any impact on the force measurements provided by Robotiq's FT300 sensor? Or is the orientation of the robot somehow compensated by some sort of calibration?

matthewd92 2016-10-19

@Tim_Smith we have only used the FT150 once in a demo but we went through a calibration sequence with the sensor to calibrate it to our motion, I would assume that it doesn't care how its mounted but maybe @Catherine_Bernier has some more insight

Annick_Mottard 2016-10-19

@Tim_Smith both the FT 300 and FT 150 sensors contain devices so they know exactly how they are oriented in the space. @matthewd92 , you are right : regardless of the robot's orientation or how it is mounted, the sensors will get their orientation information from their own internal devices. Therefore, even if you mount it on the ceiling, you will get the right data from the sensor in its reference frame.