Talking to the Puma

Abstract

The AI Lab's Unimation Puma 600 is a general-purpose industrial robot arm that has been interfaced to a Lisp Machine for use in robotics projects at the lab. It has been fitted with a force-sensing wrist. The Puma is capable of moving payloads of up to 5 pounds at up to 1 meter per second, with positioning accuracy to within a millimeter. This paper is a primer on the control of the Puma from a Lisp Machine. The current Lisp Machine interface is preliminary; the Lisp Machine communicates with the Puma is over a serial line in Unimation's VAL language. The interface will probably change over the next year; however, the commands documented in this paper will probably remain much the same.