A lot of servo drive and control tasks boil down to this: go from place X to place Y and stop. This is true whether you are using 13 servos to create highly realistic movement in a movie spider or getting an arm to pick and place correctly on an assembly line. Errors in this process include travel range errors.
Travel range errors
Examples of travel range errors include
- E253 Target position out of travel range
- F812 Motion range exceeded during commutation
- F6044 Negative travel range limit switch activated
In most cases, your device “thinks” that it will move out of its safe range if it follows the next command. Moving outside of its travel range can mean a number of things. You could end up with a robot arm hitting a wall or breaking its safety cage or moving into space occupied by a human being, as well as just overshooting the right spot for successful completion of a task. Therefore, the machine will not try it out and see whether it ends up going outside of its range or not.
Confusing?
Since this is an error based on something that might happen in the future, we sometimes hear from people who feel confused. “The machine didn’t go out of its travel range,” they say. “Why is it showing a travel range error?”
Your goal with industrial machinery is to keep it where you expect it to be. Servos move the machines to a very precise point — by nature, you might say. So a servo that allowed machinery to end up in the wrong spot would definitely have failed.
For this reason, travel range errors are not just warnings. They shut down the movement of the machine at maximum safe torque and won’t get started again until the error is cleared.
Need help dealing with travel range errors? Call us for immediate assistance.