Setup Tutorial 1:  Enabling Power and Homing

The first step in operating the system is to "enable power" and "home" the robot.   Enabling power provides power to the motors.  Homing establishes the absolute 0 position of each axis so that previously taught motions can be exactly repeated.  Many robots lose track of their axes 0 positions when power to the controller is turned off.  Homing re-establishes the 0 references using whatever technique is appropriate for the axes, e.g. pressing into a hard stop, engaging a limit switch, reading special encoder tracks, etc.

As a convenience, power enable/disable and homing buttons are provided on a number of different web panels (e.g. the Operator Control Panel, the Virtual Manual Control Pendant (VMCP), the Robot Status section of Edit and Configuration Pages).  All of these buttons perform the same functions.  For this example, we will use the Operator Control Panel.

»  Open the Operator Control Panel by clicking Operator >.

If you have started a newly loaded system that has not had all of the configuration data defined, there will be a number of benign error messages displayed in the "System Messages" window.

»  Press Clear Messages to eliminate the clutter of the old messages. (This step is not required to enable power.)   Then press Enable to turn on power to the motors.

The "System state" will transition from "Off: switch on wait" to "GPL Ready" to indicate that motor power has been successfully enabled.

»  Press Home Robot to establish the zero position for each of the axes.  This operation will move the robot and may take a minute or two to complete.

When the homing successfully completes, the "Robot homed" field will change to "Yes".  Once completed, homing does not have to repeated until the robot controller is powered down, no matter how many times motor power is enabled and disabled.