Replacing Robot Batteries

One of the most com­mon ques­tions that we get from cus­tomers is ​“what are the bat­ter­ies in my robot and con­troller used for and how often should I change them?” this usu­al­ly leads to ​“how do I change them?” The bat­ter­ies in the robot and con­troller are both used to main­tain stored data when the robot and con­troller are de-ener­gized. How­ev­er, the stored data is dif­fer­ent between the robot arm and con­troller, yet equal­ly impor­tant. Your main­te­nance man­u­al should be con­sult­ed for the prop­er method of replacement.

The data stored in the robot arm is impor­tant for main­tain­ing the encoder pulse val­ues of each axis in the robot. This con­trols the robot’s posi­tion­al data. If the bat­ter­ies in the robot­ic arm fail, the robot would need to be remas­tered, if pri­ma­ry pow­er is lost. Annu­al replace­ment, as pre­ven­tive main­te­nance, will ensure bat­ter­ies are charged and oper­at­ing as required. 

The bat­ter­ies used in the robot­ic con­troller keep the inter­nal mem­o­ry stored when there is no pow­er to the equip­ment. This includes pro­grams, installed soft­ware, sys­tem vari­ables, IO con­fig­u­ra­tions, and more. The fail­ure of these bat­ter­ies would result in the loss of this data and hours of down­time to recov­er. Anoth­er pre­cau­tion­ary step to take to pre­vent this would be to per­form reg­u­lar back-ups of the con­troller, as well as annu­al bat­tery replace­ment as pre­ven­tive maintenance. 

When stor­ing robots for long peri­ods, it is impor­tant to have back­ups of the con­troller for any data that may be required lat­er. Fresh bat­ter­ies can be installed before remov­ing pri­ma­ry pow­er. How­ev­er, this is not always nec­es­sary since the re-deploy­ment of a robot requires some of the same steps that are need­ed in a dead bat­tery situation. 

The type of bat­ter­ies used in your robot­ic sys­tem depends on the man­u­fac­tur­er and mod­el that you are work­ing with. Bat­ter­ies can be as sim­ple as a stan­dard D cell or a spe­cial­ized lithi­um bat­tery with brand-spe­cif­ic con­nec­tors. It is imper­a­tive to con­sult your robot’s main­te­nance man­u­al to con­firm you have the cor­rect bat­ter­ies on hand before you attempt to per­form a bat­tery replace­ment. It is also cru­cial that you know the loca­tion of the bat­ter­ies and how to replace them. This process can be found in your robot’s main­te­nance manual. 

Keep­ing a strict bat­tery replace­ment sched­ule, as pre­scribed by the robot man­u­fac­tur­er, is imper­a­tive to keep­ing your oper­a­tion run­ning with­out major down­time. If you need fur­ther assis­tance or need to pur­chase bat­ter­ies for your robot or con­troller, con­tact Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor of Fanuc, Motoman, ABB, and KUKA.