Educational and laboratory work cell for a robotic device

摘要

A robotic cell, or work area, especially useful for education. The cell has a plurality of interchangable work surfaces for mounting objects that the robot manipulates. Students, researchers, or other workers can thus set up separate experiments that need not be torn down each time a different user begins work with the cell. The cell has safety switches that encourage a user, when near the robot, to keep a hand on the robot so as not to be accidentally injured by the robot's motion. There is also a dead man switch effective to disenable the robot entirely, after a short time delay. The cell has a pneumatic control circuit that enables a user to position the robot's gripper arm at positions intermediate of fully up and fully down.