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STE 58762
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1-3
1.2 ROBOT LANGUAGE
Robots do assembly work and other tasks in place of people.
However, someone still has to teach the robot what to do.
Robots will only do what you tell them to do, and it's
important to tell them exactly what you want it to do.
Telling a robot what to do is called "teaching." Making a robot do what you taught it to do is called
"playback." Of course, this only applies to what are called "playback robots," which repeat (or
playback) the movements you instructed the robot when teaching. Toshiba SR Series robots are
playback robots.
There are various ways to teach a robot what to do. One way is to physically move the robot
through the work cycle (while, of course, the robot is in the teaching mode). The robot remembers
the locations where it was moved and, in the playback mode, retraces this path and performs the
work. This is the usual method for teaching painting robots and spot welding robots.
However, things get more complicated when dealing with peripheral devices (such as a parts
feeder or a conveyor belt). In such a case, you must coordinate the movements of the robot with
the movements of the peripheral devices. In the previous example, we talked about a robot
attaching a part to a workpiece coming down a conveyor line. However, what if we want to attach
different parts to different workpieces? What do we do if the robot misattaches the part and we
want to try again?
In order to tell the robot what to do, we need to express robot actions in terms the robot
understands. This is the purpose of robot language. A robot language is nothing more than a set
of words describing robot actions. An arrangement of these words used to control the movement
of the robot is called a program. Writing a program is called programming.
There are various robot languages in existence. However, SR Series robots use SCOL (Symbolic
Code Language for Robots), a language developed specifically for robots. Therefore, we will limit
our discussion of robot languages to SCOL in this Manual.