We are thrilled to announce the new release! This update brings a host of new features, improvements, and bug fixes designed to enhance your user experience and improve overall performance.

1. RapidPlan Create

1.1. Major Improvements

✅ Enhanced re-parenting feature boosts alignment process

Get ready to take your alignment to the next level with our newly enhanced re-parenting feature, designed to simplify and accelerate your workflow!

Smart Offsetting: Re-parenting your objects? Don't worry about the offset! Our feature automatically maintains the original offset with the old parent and calculates a new offset with the new parent, ensuring a smooth transition.

Bulk Re-Parenting: Now, you can effortlessly move multiple targets/frames/mates (e.g. 50 weld points) to a new parent frame while keeping the same old location! No more tedious one-by-one adjustments.

✅ Auto-Save securely save your latest work

We've added an automatic project saving feature. It will be automatically enabled after upgrading to this version. This function can be disabled from the project settings. You no longer have to worry about losing your work in the middle of a task!

✅ Create mates by double-clicking on an un-mated object

✅ Trajectory Smoothing

This feature brings a more realistic trajectory, closely mirroring the smooth paths found in real-life scenarios, which enables more accurate interference reports(New feature) and cycle time analysis.

1. Smoothing Definition: Set smoothing values from 0.0 mm to 500 mm for realistic robot trajectories.

2. Global and Individual Settings: Define smoothing globally or per waypoint.

3. Enhanced Visualization: View smoothed trajectories within RPC.

1.2. Other Improvements

• Joint Numbering Starting from One for Enhanced User Clarity: The joint numbering now starts from one instead of zero. Previously, users had to type in joint number 6 to refer to the additional external axis joint index 7, which was confusing. This update aligns the numbering with common expectations.

• Manual Connection Conversion in RPC: To provide RPC users with enhanced flexibility in handling their connections by allowing the conversion of auto-connects to manual connections, even when they contain invalid or incomplete connections.

• Saving Robot Models as RPC Project: Now supports the import of robot models with joint dependencies, coupled joints, and variable joint limits as project files.

1.3. Braking changes

• Auto-connect validation may take lot longer when loading older project (<2.4) [ID:33168]

  • A workaround is reduce the maximum number of iterations for the existing auto-connects before revalidation

2. RapidPlan Control

2.1. Major Improvements

✅ Render autoconnects and routes on canvas

• Now users can see the autoconnects and routes on RapidPlan Control
  

  Screenshare_-_2023-07-19_3_41_06_PM.mp4

   

  

✅ A cleaner and more intuitive layout

[GIF: Switching Projects and Workcell tab, enter to operation mode to show color change]

• Selected pane button now flows into the active pane, clearly indicating which pane is active

• Command Pane has been split into the Projects Pane and the Workcell Pane

• Cosmetic changes provide a more modern look and clearer indication of the mode of the appliance

✅ Speed limited link selection

• Users can now limit the maximum velocity of a robot’s links from the Robot Advanced Settings dialog

• Negative values indicate no limit, fixed links cannot be limited as they cannot move

• LIMITATION Currently, we only support one maximum speed limit. Thus the minimum nonzero limit is globally applied to all links. This will be rectified when the robot supervisor is complete

✅ Tags Selector Drop-down

• Added a target selection feature to filter the connections.

• Users can now use the dropdown to filter connections more easily.

• added a toggle option to filter either “Any connection with these targets” or

  “Connections with only these targets”.

2.2. Other Improvements

• Profinet Interface

  • Add Acquired/Released signals to the profinet IO map (ID:35429)

  • Loading and Unloading projects with PNIO (ID: 32718)

• The order of robots in Control Panel can now only be changed in settings. Robots can be drag sorted, or sorted alphabetically.

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2.3. Braking Changes

• Fanuc Robot always changes Robot Speed to 100 when acquiring control (ID:27440)

• Profinet Lookup Table breaking updates:

  • Group targets by robot/preset and frames by World/parent robot (ID:35201)

  • Data is sorted alphabetically (exceptions: stateful objects come first, Origin frame always has id 0) (ID:37577)

3. RapidPlan ASCII API

3.1. Major Improvements

• Added validation argument to UpdateTarget command

• Added BlockMove + ContinueMove commands (more details to come), also updated CombinedMove with new optional blockMove argument

• Updated Move command with a new argument constraint.

• Correction of the preset-switching behavior in a CombinedMove command.

• Updated name of HoldMove and ResumeMove commands (prev. block/continue)

• Added MultiRobotMove command and updated SetAlternateLocation with a new mode multirobot.

3.2. Other Improvements

3.3. Braking Changes

• Fanuc Robot always changes Robot Speed to 100 when acquiring control (ID:27440)

4. Known Bugs/Limitations

4.1. RapidPlan Create

4.2. RapidPlan Control

Robot Control

• ABB [20230621-8045099]: In very rare cases, the robot is not responding to the commanded trajectory. This is under investigation with ABB.

• ABB [20230609-7981814]: In very rare cases, the robot reports joint out of range error for a target that’s very close to the joint limit. This is under investigation with ABB.

• Yaskawa: if a robot is left in AcquireControl mode for more than 2 hours, a joint state loss error is reported. To avoid the error, a Yaskawa robot should be in ReleaseControl mode if left idle for an extended period of time.