An Industrial Robot with Mini Computer Control

A minicomputer has been employed to monitor and control an advanced industrial robot during transfers of colour TV picture tubes between two asynchronous conveyors. The robot system described herein extracts a face up picture tube, from the index conveyor, inverts it, tracks a continually moving monorail carrier, and deposits the tube face down on this carrier. Since an optical tracking technique is employed, no physical contact is required between the robot and the monorail carrier. An interactive programming language, A Language For Automation (ALFA), allows the user to program the robot and adapt it to other industrial transfer tasks.