The Most Relevant Available ActionBlocks and What They do

The following list describes the most utilized ActionBlocks for Industrial applications. With these ActionBlocks, one can model arbitrary Pick & Place actions for ActionBlocks Agents that offer a Movement and a Gripping Behavior. Additional ActionBlocks exist, but are usually utilized in specialized applications. Those additional ActionBlocks require agent behaviors or parameters that are typically self-explaining.

Logic Nodes

These are technically not ActionBlocks, but they are required to implement process flow control; i.e. splitting or re-synchronizing parallel processes or alternative process paths. The following list of logical nodes show the different logical functions that can be applied to ActionBlock outputs.

Once one logical node is placed inside a program, its function can be changed by selecting the desired behavior from the menu (see the AND logic node).

Delay

This ActionBlock delays the execution of a process path. To change the delay, enter or connect a value.

ActionBlockSetJointAccRel and ActionBlockSetJointVelRel

These ActionBlocks set the relative Joint Acceleration or Velocity limits. These limits have an influence on the speed of the simulated robot’s movements. They require the corresponding Joint Vector parameters to set the acceleration or velocity. The vectors need to have a length equal to the robot’s kinematics’s number of joints.

MoveToPose

This ActionBlock commands an Agent that has a Movement Behavior to move to a pose. To do so, it utilizes the aforementioned behavior, which will usually be a kinematic simulated movement behavior. The movement will conform to the current Joint Acceleration and Velocity limits. This ActionBlock requires a Movement Target as a parameter, usually a ParameterAutoMovementTargetFromPosePath.

When multiple consecutive movements with the same ParameterAutoMovementTargetFromPosePath are done by some ActionBlocks, each movement will move to the next pose of that path. If the corresponding move will be a PTP or a Cartesian move depends on that pose and is set when teaching the pose paths prior to ActionBlock modeling.

Grip and GripClosest

These ActionBlocks command an Agent that has the Gripping Behavior to grip a TouchPoint. The Grip ActionBlock requires a TouchPoint as its parameter, while GripClosest will automatically select the next ungripped TouchPoint in the vicinity of the Agent’s Gripper (which is usually modeled at the TCP of a simulated robot).

These ActionBlocks offer a digital signal output that indicates if they successfully gripped the TouchPoint or not (which can happen if the target TouchPoint was already gripped or out of range of the Gripper).

ReleaseGrip

This ActionBlock commands an Agent that has the Gripping Behavior to release the currently gripped TouchPoint from its Gripper.