Circular vs Linear movements

UR robots support circular movements and linear movements, however, you may see errors on the teach pendant if you use the driver for UR robots.

You may see the following errors when you use the UR robot driver ("Run on robot" option) because the driver doesn’t apply all the default filters you have in the UR post processor by default. These filters help clean the code so the UR controller can run the program without issues.

These errors include:

1.Circular arc with infinite radius (CIRCULAR_ARC_WITH_INFINITE_RADIUS): you may see this error when you try to make a circular movement with a large radius. The post processor automatically converts these movements to linear movements.

2.Circular arc with zero radius (CIRCULAR_ARC_WITH_ZERO_RADIUS): you may see this error with small circular movements. The post processor may remove these movements or convert them to linear moves.

You should not see these errors when you generate the program offline (right click a program and select Generate program, or F6) or automatically send them to the robot (right click a program and select Send program to robot, or Ctrl+F6). These two methods of generating the program use the post processor instead of the driver.

If you still experience errors generating the program offline (not using the driver), you can automatically convert arc moves to linear moves by following these steps:

1. Select Tools-Options-Program.
2. Set Minimum arc size to 1 mm.
3. Set Maximum arc size to 0.5 mm.
4. Set Minimum step size to 0.5 mm: this will make sure you don't export points closer than 0.5 mm so the blend radius has some effect, you can increase it more to have fewer jerky movements.