Question: how complex was the software for the robot arm

Simon Lay answered on 22 Jun 2015:

Our Robots can be ‘taught’ repetitive tasks. You do this by putting them into teach mode which slows down the movement. You can then get up close to them with a kind of remote control called a ‘teach pendant’. The arm can be driven to and from the required points and this information is stored as a number of vector coordinates. The robot can then give feedback as to where it is at any given moment in time and you can use this information to ensure that any other motorised equipment is out of the way by setting up exclusion zones for allowable and disallowable conflicts. The camera can extra give feedback to kill the power to all moving parts in the event of something going wrong. Therefore the protection software isn’t to tricky as it is just a load of data comparisons but the raw list of instructions to the robot looks unintelligible.
I did hear a story that a Robot in a car plant wasn’t configured properly to get out of the way when the cars moved on the conveyor belt and the belt wasn’t interlocked to the Robot to check it was clear. It was still inside a body shell when the line moved on and the result was a damaged robot and a number of damage Nissan Micra body shells (some might say not a great loss)!!