I’m currently working in Visual Components Premium 4.10 and I’ve run into a question regarding vacuum grippers from the eCatalog.
Unlike standard mechanical grippers, vacuum grippers don’t seem to have explicit open/close signals or digital I/O behaviors.
So I’m a bit confused about how they are intended to be used:
Are eCatalog vacuum grippers already fully configured to be controlled directly via a robot subprogram (e.g., Pick & Place), once attached to the robot?
Or do they require adding custom signals / behaviors (e.g., digital outputs, scripts, or vacuum logic) to simulate suction properly?
How is the attach/detach logic typically handled for suction tools compared to finger grippers?
From a real robot perspective, I would expect at least a digital output signal to activate vacuum, so I’m trying to understand how this is abstracted in VC.
Any clarification or best practices would be really appreciated!
It’s an interesting question, first of all, many of your questions can be found in the corresponding tutorials that can be found at Academy, and I think you may need to look for the tutorials before seeking out the bits for more careful questions.
However, I have a concept for you inside that needs to be explained, it’s generally the robot that actually does the grasping, not the tool, and at the end of the day your artifacts are attached to the robot and not to the tool.
More fundamentally, the Action Script in Wizards is what makes it work, and he will create a series of content that will include, grabs, motion tracking, envelopes, quick swaps, and other actions, which you can also find in more detail through the tutorial I mentioned earlier.
Regarding crawling, you can actually use the Crawl Assistant (regular or enhanced) within the forums, which is also a favorite method. Going a bit more in-depth, you can also write your own scripts to grab them, but those are for later.
Currently in eCat models it goes so that simulation action of grasping and releasing an object is in the robot component. We call these the signal actions (Signal Grasp and Release Actions | Visual Components Academy). In simulation sense it has some benefits as it being easy to just take a robot from eCat and being able to perform grasp and release without you even considering any tool, for example in really early phase of planning a cell or a line. Tools in this design do not actually grasp or release anything and signals connected to them only produce tool motion like gripper jaw closing and opening. And in that sense vacuum gripper doesn’t need a signal as VC does not simulate air flow or pressure.
Looking at the history simulation has been the main use case for VC. But nowadays there are more and more features for offline programming and emulation. So as we’re getting closer and closer to real life control systems it would make more sense to have grasp and release action in the tool instead of the robot. And in that case you would need those signals in vacuum gripper as well. Downside is that now you couldn’t grasp and release with the robot alone. This is more realistic but will slow down quick designs if you always need to specify a tool for the robot.