Robot Cloning

Robot cloning means either the restoration or the duplication of a robot plant. The purpose of robot cloning is to avoid the manual teach-in of robot programmes and to take the advantage of synergetic effects.

Nevertheless, due to a position mismatch of the cloned robot, these targets often cannot be realized. In this case, there has to be an additional teach-in, which also means an additional expenditure of time and costs. In order to avoid this manual teach-in of the robot programmes, there is a possibility that allows saving time and that is, in addition, very exact: You may store the original calibration and subsequently, it will be restored; a procedure that is made possible by the measuring system LaserLAB.

Recovery of a robot cell

It is often the case that in course of time the number and the complexity of robot programmes on a robot plant continuously grow with the tasks that have to be carried out.
Therefore, it is quite obvious that the expenditure of time and costs that occurs with every teach-in procedure in case of a crash or the replacement of certain components (replacement of engines, gears, wrists or robots) will be ever increasing. In the worst case, this procedure may last several days.

Duplication of a robot cell

IIn practice, it is very often the case that robot programmes on a single plant have to run through costly teach-in procedures before they are duplicated on one or several identical plants. This should not require any additional manual teach-in procedure.
The realization of this difficult task may be made possible if firstly the target kinematics is almost identical to the master kinematics which may be guaranteed by a robot calibration and if secondly, the component’s coordinate systems of the robots will be individually calibrated at each single position. For more and detailed information concerning this topic please see Calibration into component’s coordinate systems.