[Maarten]

I'm using RoboDK to design the motion of multiple robots and mechanisms in a single station. I would like to know if it is possible to export/generate a *single* file which contains the commands for not just one but *all* robots and mechanisms in the station.

In RoboDK I have made separate "sub" programs for the movements of each individual robot and mechanism. I also have a "main" program which consecutively calls these sub programs, and the simulation is exactly as I want.

The main program is however inherently associated with only 1 robot or mechanism. When exporting this main program to a Python file, I see all subprograms are called as subfunctions in the main() function, but only the ones that affect the associated robot or mechanism are actually included in the file; the others are skipped.

I understand different robots and mechanisms may need different postprocessors, but at this point any postprocessor would do, as long as it contains all commands for all robots and mechanisms, and tells me which command corresponds to which robot or mechanism.

Possibly I could export the main program for each individual robot and mechanism separately, but this would be cumbersome and I hope to find a more elegant solution.

[Jeremy]

I'm in a similar situation right now with one of my projects and my simple solution, for now, is to link all the subprograms to the main robot before post-processing.

[Maarten]

Hi Jeremy, thanks for helping out, your solution seems to work! I set the linked robot for all subprograms to one robot, export the main program for that same one, and the Python file contains all subfunctions with all commands; exactly what I needed. Two things:

1) Changing the linked robots does however mess up the simulation (understandably). So after exporting, the linked robot for every single subprogram would need to be manually reset in order to go back to simulation. With a RoboDK model incorporating all robots and mechanisms in a station ready, I think RoboDK could be the right program to enable an operator to easily design new motions, and export the plan for use in the real world. To make this done easily indeed, is there a script available to change the linked robot for all subprograms and back, so the operator wouldn't have to change any of these?

2) To facilitate re-linking the commands in the Python file to the right robot/mechanism controller, I could incorporate the names of the specific robot to the name of the subprograms, e.g Rob1_goHome, Rob1_doTrick, Rob2_goHome, Rob2_doTrick, Mech1_goHome, Mech1_doSinus, etc. Do you see another way to provide this information in the Python file of which command belongs to which robot/mechanism, not using the name of the subprogram but somehow including the name of the intended linked robot/mechanism?

We plan to put this in practice in a few months, so if any development is going on on this topic it would be helpful for me to know. Either on mentioned scripts or perhaps a dedicated export function that gets rid entirely of the suggested work-arounds.

Thanks again, Maarten.

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Another option would be a script to export the main function consecutively for each individual robot/mechanism, without changing the linked robot/mechanism in the subprograms. Multiple output files would then be created, one for each robot/mechanism, from which the required information would need to be collected and combined.