What does the object orientation feature do?

Catherine_Bernier 2016-11-02

Wondering what does the object orientation feature do?

Here is a video I just made explaining just that. Notice the position of the part and how the gripper goes to grab it. In the second half of the video, you can see that even if the part is rotated, the gripper follows the same orientation than taught.

https://youtu.be/Umm3Ti_3EMA

This can be useful if you have a symmetrical part like a cylinder or if you don't want the camera to locate the part in another orientation causing an undesired rotation of the gripper.

Any other application in which this feature can be useful?

Sebastien 2016-11-09

@Catherine_Bernier
Very nice. When it is said that it is ignoring the orientation, is this simply that the vision systems returns only X and Y coordinate to the robot?
If you look at the following discussion, it looks like if you are teaching a round/symmetrical object, if your pick position is not perfectly in the middle, there seems to be a match angle that still affects the repeatability of the picking position. What I understand from that discussion is that the angle found between the pattern that you taught and the pattern that you found still has an impact on position result. Here is a picture to try to illustrate my point. Can you try to explain in more details how this object orientation feature works.
zoom

Annick_Mottard 2016-11-09

@Sebastien
Your thinking is correct. If you have taught a part that is symmetrical like the circle in your example, the precision and repeatability of the system will depend on your waypoint. The lack of feature on the part will make it difficult to predict in what orientation the vision system will detect the part. The distance between your waypoint and the actual part's center will induce what seems like a decrease the system's repeatability. This is detailed in the discussion you are referring to.

When you select the Ignore object orientation checkbox, the robot will move to that X and Y position without rotating its wrist. If you have an offset between the waypoint taught and the actual part's center using a symmetrical part, this offset will be applied even with the Ignore object orientation checkbox. Considering your example, the robot would move to the cross icons in the figure shown.

bsawlor 2017-08-11

Hi @Catherine_Bernier, this would be very useful for applications where an external tool like screwdriver/torque gun/etc. is used and wrist 3 won't move so the tooling hits the arm and faults out. Until that update becomes available, is there a recommended solution to avoid collision?