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Joystick device is ‘the easiest way to program a robot’

19 October, 2018

A Texas company claims to have come up with simplest and possibly the quickest way to program almost any industrial robot. Sisu, which describes itself as an “innovator of electromechanical machines and robotic automation”, says that its patent-pending Vudu programming system does not need robot programming expertise, and can be programmed by machinists, welders and other non-programming professionals.

Vudu allows you to program industrial robots in minutes, not hours,” says the company’s co-founder and CEO, Russ Aldridge. “With its intuitive design and visual programming interface, Vudu dramatically decreases the complexity of programming and opens the door for thousands of new automation applications.”

Programming is done using a combination of a touchscreen pendant and a handheld joystick that translates and rotates the robot’s end-effector in six degrees of freedom. Using the joystick, you can push, pull, or rotate the end-effector into any position, without needing to touch the robot. The robot’s frame of reference adjusts constantly to the position of the user both during large positioning movements and during fine adjustments. Unlike conventional robot pendant controls, the user does not need to guess which way the robot will move when a button is pressed.

Sisu’s patent-pending technology allows you to move a robot arm with six degrees of freedom rapidly and intuitively, says the company.

You can also write programs visually via the touchscreen pendant, using an intuitive tree structure with point-to-point moves, path moves, I/O operations, and logic structures.

Sisu is planning to launch Vudu commercially in early 2019.




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