Service Training to Master a Fanuc M20iA Robot


Today, let’s discuss mastering your Fanuc robot arm. Let’s cover when you should do this and how it’s accomplished.

Our demonstration robot will be the Fanuc Robot M-20iA running on the r30iB controller. The first step is understanding if we need to remaster the robot. We don’t want to master it if it’s not required. Look at all the motions and top points to see if they look off or require touchups. This is a big indicator that your master is off.

Once we believe that it should be remastered, let’s verify it. Jog all the joints to the mechanical zeroes. Hit the position on the keypad, select joint values, take a look at the values for any outliers.

Now, let’s go through the reasons for when remastering is required. We take a look at the motor here. We have a cable on top. If you remove this at any time, you will need to remaster the robot. The second is the motor itself. If this is disconnected at all to the robot you will need to remaster. The third one is when the battery case is removed or if the batteries internally fail when the robot is ever powered down.

Let’s master this robot. Select the menu button, go next and select system. You’ll notice, there is no mastery option so we’ll have to enable that. Let’s go to the variables. Scroll down to master_enable. Select zero on the master enable and change it to one. Hit enter. F1 Type and the newly enabled master is available.

We’re going to cover two of these options. Zero position master and single axis master. Zero position master first.

This is going to master all your joints at the same time, so you better make sure you have jogged all the joints to their mechanical zero. Select yes, scroll down to calibrate, and select yes, also.

The second option we’re going to cover is the single axis master. Select the joint that needs to be mastered, change the value from a zero to a one, press execute. You see the value turns back to a zero. Hit the previous button and calibrate.

It’s always a good idea to hit the position button and verify that all the joints, or the joint that you remastered, is actually zeroed out.