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Home > Robot Safety > Possible to monitor the safety settings externally?
kawhitt

Is it possible to automatically send a command to an external device (PLC), indicating that safety settings have been changed?  Or, using a PLC, fetch the safety settings from the robot, to verify that they have not been changed?  I have been told that a competitive robot manufacturer has that ability on his collaborative robot.
matthewd92

Which settings are you referring to?  Do you mean the configurable IO, normal and reduced mode settings?  Looking at the documentation for the streaming port 30001 it appears that you can get back some of the configuration data for the joints such as range and max speed but I am not seeing anything specific to the configurable I/O or the normal/reduced mode settings.

@Stefan_Stubgaard any way to get this information remotely?
kawhitt

Their specific question was "is there a way to monitor (externally) when the safety torque setting has been changed on the UR robot".  I interpret that to mean that the maximum speed or force was changed. Or, that the reduced mode speed or force was changed.

I did not see any type of "get" commands that provide this type of information...
matthewd92

@kawhitt so I was doing a little playing around with the simulator and there is an event logged in the robot logs when the safety settings are changed as the checksum changes.  So it might be possible to listen to port 30001 for event type ROBOT_MESSAGE_TEXT which is messageType=20, robotMessageType=0 and then look for the message to contain "Safety Checksum Changed". You can see in the screen shot below what it looks like in the logs

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Now, I don't know how you could read what the changes were but you would know if a change was made.  Also, its possible to lock all of this out from your operators several ways.  One is just password protecting the safety screen as well as the ability to get to the program screen, these could be separate passwords so your programmers can still get to the program to make changes but only safety authorized users can get to the actual safety settings to change them.

You can also remotely change the user level and therefore not even expose to the user the ability to get to the program screen regardless if they know the password, this is from the support documentation for the dashboard server which is port 29999 and accepts simple commands via TCP/IP protocol

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Hope this helps answer the question

kawhitt

@matthewd92  Yes.  That is helpful.  I will be able to tell them, without equivocating, that it can be monitored so that changes can be noted.  And, in fact, the screen can be locked so that, regardless of password control, the screen to change the settings cannot be accessed.

thank-you.
matthewd92

@kawhitt So one thing to note, the ability to change the user level can be done from any computer, all you need is something that allows you to connect to a TCP/IP socket as a client and send the text string.  We use SocketTest for this and it works really easy.  So if they want to hide the program screen you just simply send the string "setUserRole operator" and it locks out the program screen from the user so there is now no way to get to the safety screen in the installation tab to make any changes

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This also locks them out of the ability to make any actual changes to the robot set-up outside of language and calibrating the screen

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Kaleb_Rodes