Telerobot Software

Description and Reference Information for Telerobot Software in Telelabs


Andrew Babbage's thesis provides useful background information on the development of the telerobot, the various software systems that were developed to provide this world famous internet site, and finally the LabVIEW robot interface routines. In particular chapter 6 provides a detailed account of functions for handling frames and calculating wrist rotation angles. Chapter 7 provides a useful outline, particularly in the first part, to show how robot movements are generated. The section on Active-X event processing needed more details – see S4EventLogger.vi description below. Chapter 8 was presented in outline only and this detailed documentation provides what is missing there. Andrew's most lasting contribution was to sort out how Active-X controls can be used to link LabVIEW with the ABB Robot S4 controller package RobComm.

I took over at the final stage of commissioning the telelabs software system that Andrew had started: Andrew was too busy with final exam preparation. I had to revise the structure of the 'run hardware' level and had a frustrating time trying to work out why some status change events were never received. Once this was resolved the rest was routine and I largely followed the telelabs templates for the hardware and remote clients.

There are several significant deficiencies that need to be remedied in the short term.

When the robot was briefly made available for public use over the weekend of 19th December, one user managed to crash the robot into the table. I am not sure how. The main issue was that we had no log files that recorded the robot movements so they could be played back for checking.

We urgently need a system to make users responsible: a registration system, so that we can track users and deny access to troublesome ones.