Robot steps overview

Before running any flowchart, you need to install binaries on your robot controller, which allow you to use the specialized commands to interface with Matrox Design Assistant. The commands are specific to the brand of robot controller you have. For full documentation of how to install the binaries on your robot contoller, and an explanation of the Matrox commands to include in your robot controller code, see Matrox Robot-side Communication API. This documentation, along with the installation files and demo code are all found on your computer at Program Files\Matrox Imaging\MIL\Config\Robots.

Once a robot controller is connected to your network, you must add and configure it in Matrox Design Assistant. You can add robot controllers using the Robots page of the Platform Configuration dialog. From here you can add, rename, configure, or delete a robot controller. When configuring a robot controller, you must specify its type and IP address.

Using a robot controller with Matrox Design Assistant would typically have a flowchart with a RobotWait step near or at the top of the main flowchart loop, usually above a Camera step. The RobotWait step would pause the flowchart until it receives a request from the robot controller. Program control will then return to the flowchart, which would typically grab an image, process it, locate an object or otherwise determine a position for the robot to move to, and then send that position back to the robot controller through a RobotWriter step. The loop would then complete and return to the top, where the RobotWait step will pause until it receives the next request from the robot controller.

The following flowchart demonstrates the general use case, with the FindPosition subflowchart being all the steps that process the image to locate where the robot should move to.

Position data is sent using the following 6 values: X, Y, Z, Pitch, Roll, and Yaw. In addition, for more advanced applications involving multiple object/part types or applications where multiple occurrences of objects might be present in the field of view, you can use the ObjectId value to inform the robot controller. For more advanced applications requiring transferring data between a robot controller and Matrox Design Assistant, you can use the Opcode value to inform the robot controller about different operations.

The RobotWriter step and RobotParameters step send data to and receive data from the robot controller, respectively. The data they transmit are named in Matrox Design Assistant as the following 8 values: X, Y, Z, Pitch, Roll, Yaw, Opcode, and ObjectId. These values are typically used to send position data, but can be repurposed. If you use these values for an alternative purpose, you must ensure that your robot controller code is modified accordingly.