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Mohammad SAFEEA edited this page Aug 2, 2018 · 8 revisions

Getting started, the requirements

Before starting to use the Toolbox for controlling the robot, it is required to have the following software/hardware available:

1 Hardware requirements

The following equipment are required to be available:

  1. One of KUKA iiwa manipulators R800 or R820.
  2. An up-to-date external PC/laptop with good computational power.
  3. Good Ethernet cable, a category five or better.

Then a network between the robot and the PC shall be established. To establish the network the user shall do the following:

  1. Using an Ethernet cable, connect the X66 port of the robot to the Ethernet port of your PC.
  2. From the teach pendant of the manipulator, verify the IP of the robot, (explained in the video tutorials “Tutorial 1”).
  3. Then on the external PC, the user shall change the IP of the PC into a static IP in the range of robot's IP.

2 Software requirements

The following software packages are required:

  1. MATLAB: the user shall have MATLAB installed a PC connected to the robot, using MATLAB and KST, the user will be able to control the manipulator from the external PC, in such a case the user may use the operating system of his preference, Windows, Linux or Mac.
  2. Sunrsie.Workbench: the user will need the Sunrsie.Workbench only once to synchronize the (MatlabToolboxServer) application of the KST to the controller of the robot.

3 Architecture of KST

The KST has a client server architecture, demonstrated in the following figure:

The server is a multi-threaded Java application that runs inside the robot controller. Before starting to utilize the toolbox the user shall synchronize the server application into the robot controller, this server application is available in the folder KUKA_Sunrise_server_source_code of the repository. A step by step instructions on how to synchronize the server application into the controller of the robot is demonstrated in the document Import KST to SunriseWorkbench.pdf. After being synchronized the user shall run the server application from the teach pendant of the robot as shown in the following figure:

Once is running, the toolbox can be used to connect to the robot from Matlab, notice that the server application has a time out of 60 seconds by default. If a connection was not established during this time interval the server will turn off automatically, in such a case you shall restart it manually before trying to connect again, this time interval can be changed/disabled using the steps available in the following video tutorial.

The client side of the KST toolbox runs on an external PC or laptop, the client files are available in the folder Matlab_client, this client is written using Matlab scripting language, the main programming class of the toolbox is the KST.m class, a wrapper class that wraps the various functions offered by KST toolbox, the user can use this class to control the robot from Matlab.

More info on how to use the toolbox is available in the User's manual document.

Copyright: Mohammad SAFEEA, University of Coimbra, Portugal, Ensam University, Lille, France.

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