Hi Pros,

I recently stumbled upon a Youtube video that shows a Parker controller being used to sink a the position of the UR with the position of a linear actuator. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5tr4Lo1Los

I don't have much experience with advanced applications like this, but is the Parker controller required to be able to sink the robot's position with an actuator? I thought you could setup the UR's conveyor tracking to an external device without using a 3rd party controller? 

Are there major advantages linked to this type of setup?

Thanks!

You need something that can send out encoder counts so that the conveyor tracking can work. In this example they are sending encoder counts from the linear actuator via the PAC from Parker via Modbus TCP/IP. Pretty interesting actually with some potential applications I can think of. With a little setup I'm sure you could do the same thing using a linear encoder tied directly to the robot. If you notice, they are still just using the robots conveyor tracking system to match the motion. 

Thanks @matthewd92 , I wasn't sure if the linear actuator had an output that could be relayed directly to the UR's controller, but that makes sense now! There seems to be a small lag time between the robot's motion and the linear actuator's motion, is this to be expected when using conveyor tracking? Or can this small positional accuracy issue be eliminated by changing certain parameters in the conveyor tracking controls?

Not sure what is causing the lag, is it the difference between the time that the linear actuator is moving until the robot gets the encoder signal via the PAC and Modbus, possibly.  That would be an interesting test though to see how accurate you could get the motion to follow, its been a while since I did a conveyor tracking project.