Electricity: motive power systems – Positional servo systems – Program- or pattern-controlled systems
Patent
1991-10-15
1992-12-08
Ip, Paul
Electricity: motive power systems
Positional servo systems
Program- or pattern-controlled systems
318563, 318565, 395 89, 307 64, 901 3, B25J 1906
Patent
active
051701090
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to a method of controlling a robot in the event of a power failure, by restarting the operation of the robot by resupplying an electric power thereto, and more specifically, to a method of controlling a robot in the event of a power failure by which the operation of the robot can be restarted after an electric power has been supplied to the robot, without the need for a robot controller for saving various data at all times during an operation thereof.
BACKGROUND ART
A factory using industrial robots is generally equipped with many apparatuses requiring a large amount of electric power, and thus the probability of the occurence of a power failure therein is high. Once a power failure occurs, the operation of the robots cannot be restarted in the same state as before, even if an electric power has been again supplied thereto, and thus the operator must carry out the procedures necessary for restarting the operation thereof. Consequently, when many industrial robots are used in a large manufacturing line, the restarting of the operation of the robots takes a long time, which causes a problem in the management of the factory.
To simply restart the operation, there is used a method of saving the data of a task processed by a processor, at predetermined intervals, in a non-volatile memory or the like. More specifically, when a power failure occurs, the data saved in the non-volatile memory is read out and the processing state when the power failure occurred is restored, and thus the operation of a robot can be restarted in the same state as before.
Nevertheless, when a robot is controlled by a complex method, the number of data to be saved is increased and the data must be saved at very short intervals, and thus the load on a processor is increased. When the intervals at which the data is saved are increased, a time lag between a time at which data is saved and a time at which a power failure occurs is also increased, and thus the robot cannot be correctly restarted in the same state as before.
DISCLOSURE OF THE INVENTION
Taking the above into cosideration, an object of the present invention is to provide a method of controlling a robot in the event of a power failure, by which the operation of a robot can be restarted after an electric power has been resupplied to the robot, without the need for a robot controller to save various data during the operation thereof.
To attain the above object, according to the present invention, there is provided a method of controlling a robot in the event of a power failure, for restarting the robot by resupplying an electric power, which method comprises the steps of, detecting by a power failure detecting circuit that a voltage has dropped or an input power supply has been cut off, notifying an operating system (OS) through the power failure detection circuit of the interruption of the power failure detection, writing a power failure flag to a non-volatile memory and stopping a task being performed, by the OS, causing the OS to execute a power failure processing for the OS with reference to the power failure flag after electric power has been resupplied, initializing hardware by the OS, executing a power failure processing routine by each task in accordance with an instruction from the OS, and operating the robot by the OS from the point at which the robot was stopped when the power failure occurred.
When the power failure detection circuit detects that a voltage has dropped or the power has been cut off, the circuit notifies the operating method (OS) of this event and the OS writes a power failure flag to a non-volatile memory and stops a task being performed. The data of the task being performed is saved in the non-volatile memory.
After an electric power has been resupplied to the robot, the OS executes a power failure processing of itself with reference to the power failure flag, initializes hardware, executes a power failure processing routine of each task, and restarts the operation of the robot from the position at w
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Hashimoto Yoshiki
Nishi Hiroji
Yanagita Akihiro
Fanuc Ltd.
Ip Paul
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