VAL language and velocity control of industrial robot

Question

In my bachelor, I programmed CNC machines. Now, working with an Industrial robot arm, I learn that their programming languages are mostly similar. VAL is a typical example, for instance:

PROGRAM PICKPLACE
  1. MOVE P1
  2. MOVE P2
  3. MOVE P3
  4. CLOSEI 0.00
  5. MOVE P4
  6. MOVE P5
  7. OPENI 0.00
  8. MOVE P1
.END

Most of the cases, control of a robot arm is similar to this example. Cleary, move end-effector to a point with a given pose.

But... is there any way that I can control the end-effector (EE) speed? An example is "Move EE to P1 with time duration T1", or "Move EE to P1 with velocity V1" (I could have only seen defining for joint rotational velocity) In other way of speaking, I can command the EE to move from P0 to P1 but cannot control the duration of that traverse which is necessary in cases of EE velocity control

the experienced in robotics programming and VAL please help! I've stuck in this problem for months

Answer 1

Hunting around for a Puma manual, I found the PUMA Unofficial User’s Guide which says:

MOVE

Move the gripper/tool to the location set up. Usually this command follows an APPRO but it is not required. The robot will move at the last speed specified.

Use: MOVE

Example: MOVE PART

In the example the robot would move directly to the location “PART” that was set up in a previous step.

Emphasis added by me.

Unfortunately setting speed was one of the commands omitted from this guide, which led me to the User’s Guide to VAL 398H2A which explains (on page 55 in the pdf) that speed depends on the SPEED monitor value, the SPEED command (p74) and the which types of motion (see Trajectory control on p39). There are different kinds of MOVE commands, MOVE, MOVES, MOVEST and MOVET all have significantly different behaviours.

Given any two of speed, distance and time you can calculate the third, sadly this documentation suggests that speed is in terms of percentage of the 'Normal' speed of the robot and it is not clear how much support there is for the robot assisting in calculating for you any of these three parameters. I cannot imagine that it is not possible however.