Remote Access Toolkit for industrial robots

This paper describes the development of a toolkit for LabVIEW, allowing remote communication and programming of ABB industrial robots from a standard PC. The toolkit facilitates remote robot control over Ethernet and can be readily applied to numerous industrial applications for remote administration and control, and real-time data logging. The toolkit enables robot programs to be loaded, started and stopped from LabVIEW. Robot variables may be monitored and modified on-line, plus file transfer and logging capabilities are also available. Context help is available for the toolkit together with a detailed user reference within the LabVIEW help environment. When errors occur in the robot domain, they are interpreted and expressed in plain English. A custom, crossplatform C library underpins the toolkit and therefore makes it accessible to many applications and programming languages.