Known Limitations

Owned by Patrick McGrath
Last updated: Oct 14, 2024 by Alex Soler
2 min read

Known feature limitations

  • Sensor or environment noise can have an impact on robot motion. Lighting issues, reflective materials etc. may falsely appear as obstacles, which can negatively impact the robot’s motion and the velocity performance

  • Although the system theoretically can support an unbounded number of cameras and robots, we have focused on supporting systems with up to 4 cameras and 2 robots. Systems with more than 4 cameras or 2 robots may experience unknown issues.

  • The RapidSense product does not currently provide guidance to the user on number of cameras, camera placement, or optimal lighting conditions.

  • RapidPlan and RapidSense will be limited by the accuracy of the workcell’s “digital twin”. Misalignment between the real and virtual world may lead to slower cycle times due to recalculating paths to avoid parts of the scene that aren’t represented in the model but “identified as obstacles” through RapidSense. Creating/maintaining an accurate digital representation of the physical workcell is important for performance and is the responsibility of the user.

  • This system setup requires the use of the command line and is not yet available to be completely through the UI, but clear documentation has been created on the process. RTR support may be required for initial RapidSense setup.

  • RapidSense tools do not provide guidance on if calibration targets are effective for calibration.

  • RapidSense does not have ability to recognize expected vs. unexpected objects aside from robots, so setup will have to disable collision checking on the pick motion. That means if the pick location is blocked, or the part is in the wrong orientation, the robot may collide with it.

  • If something is resting on the robot, it will be filtered out and the robot will continue moving.

  • RapidSense is not safety certified for collaboration with humans.

  • RapidSense is only supported for GPUs with double-point precision (nvidia anything GTX 4xx, AMD anything beyond Radeon Pro VII, most GPUs from 2020 or later should not have any issues)

Known bugs

  • Calibration will show as succeeded even if it couldn't get a valid image of the cal plate. Even if the plate is in view, the camera can be too far from the plate. To avoid this, a user should use other tools such as the Frame Viewer to validate that their calibration targets are visible/valid.

  • If a camera is unplugged, RapidSense may not throw an error or fault.

  • Robots running at high speeds may see the robot stop unexpectedly due to latency in the robot filtering. Robots moving up to 1.5 m/s tool speed should not see any issues.

  • There are some cases where the robot filter does not start running. If this occurs, the current mitigation for this is to re-start the proxy service.

  • Voxels may remain outside of a volume when editing volume bounds.

  • If starting the calibration service while already at the first calibration target, the calibration service misses the delayed response. Recommended suggestion to avoid this is to start calibration from home instead.

  • Calibration will attempt to calibrate a camera that is no longer connected and then hang.