>> My name is Timothy Haag.
I am a robot programmer at Midwest Engineering Systems in Pewaukee.
The company builds custom automated manufacturing equipment for a variety
of different industries, very small, delicate components for aircraft jet engines.
I've worked on [inaudible] for customers that handle large, heavy beams for pallet racking.
I'm just working on a system right now that does plasma cutting.
It's taking samples for what the customer builds.
So we kind of do a little bit of everything.
I can get involved as early as mechanical design because we'll work pretty closely.
The robotics engineering department will work pretty closely with the mechanical
and electrical engineering departments to, you know,
decide robot reach envelopes, how far can the robot reach?
How fast can it move?
Can it handle this item as quickly as we need it to for time basis?
So it can be as early as that.
But typically I get involved after mechanical engineering is done and a general sequence
of operations is written and it's handed to me and that's where I step in
and start writing the program and working with a PLC programmer or an electrical engineer to kind
of do that back and forth between the rest of the automated equipment and the robot.
Well, when we start, I mean, it's a blank slate.
The robot is a blank slate.
It's got, you know, base system software on it.
It may need to have application-specific options installed: things for welding,
things for tracking an external sensor, vision.
Those are things that would have to get installed early
on in my interaction with the robot.
And then it's sitting down and -- a lot of times what I'll start with is I'll draw a diagram
of how that program needs to run.
And it'll be -- so it'll be a picture,
a depiction of what the program should look like and how it should operate.
And then from there, it's just sitting down at a keyboard and it's typing out the logic,
deciding how that's all going to get handled internally in the robot program itself.
You know, and then from there, once the program is written, you know,
call it version one, there's a lot of testing.
There's debug because you never do anything right the first time
and so it's running the program.
It's making sure the robot isn't going to crash, going to damage anything,
and then making all those little tweaks towards the end of the project to make sure
that it's running exactly the way the customer wants it to run.