Communicate with External Servo Motors

URhaile

Dear all Pros,

We using UR5 model, and we need to build the moving robot mounting system (x,y,z) for pallet application.
1/ Could you recommend us which type of servo motors suitable for this app? 
2/ The best choice to connect/communicate these motors with UR controller?
3/ How many external servo motor that UR controller can connect/communicate?
4/ Some advice for this app ?

Thank you for your support.
 
---
Your sincerely,

matthewd92

We are working on a project that we plan to use a Festo linear servo axis with a UR10. Festo demonstrated a URCap at Automate this year but it's not publicly available at this time. We are writing our own connector between the robot and the servo controller. I have seen a demo of a Parker servo motor using Modbus to communicate with the robot.  I am not aware of any that currently offer actual integration into the robot natively.

We have a couple of stepper motor driven linear 7th axes attached to the robot cells, 1 uses a program that runs on the motor controller and digital I/O between the robot and motor controller to control the motion. The other we wrote our own connector library between the stepper driver and the robot that allows us to write the control program on the robot instead. 

matthewd92

I've never done more than 1 but you can have dozens of threads so there's no technical reason you couldn't talk to 3 or more systems.  

URhaile

Hi matthewd92, thank you for your advice. In your experience, with one UR controller box can control/communicate with how many servo motors (like 7th, 8th, 9th axes....)?