Stäubli industrial robots

Stäubli six-axis arms are the heavy end of laboratory plate handling: fully encapsulated, hollow-shaft arms with no external cabling, repeatability of ±0.02 mm across the range, and variants qualified for cleanroom, ESD and humid environments. Where a dedicated microplate mover is sized for microplates, a Stäubli arm carries kilogram-class payloads — racks, tube trays, instrument drawers — with the reach to serve a walled cell rather than a bench.

Revolution’s driver targets the TX90 generation on the CS8 controller. That is the earlier generation: Stäubli’s current published six-axis range is the TX2 series on the CS9 controller, and Stäubli documents the CS8 as the controller for its RX, TX, TS, TP and paint robots. If you are specifying a new cell, you will be quoted a TX2 arm — talk to us about the controller interface before you order, because the driver connects to a CS8.

At a glance

Axes	Six
Repeatability	±0.02 mm across the TX2 range
Payload	3.7–14 kg, depending on model
Reach	670–1,450 mm, depending on model
Protection	IP65, or IP67 with the pressurized version
Sensitive environments	Cleanroom up to ISO class 2, ESD-compatible and humid-environment versions
Revolution control	Plate transfers, scheduled through Revolution’s transfer system

Specifications

Stäubli publishes the following for the current TX2 six-axis range. Payload and reach trade off against each other within a family, so the model choice is a cell-layout decision: the longest arm in the TX2-90 family reaches 1,450 mm but carries half the load of the shortest.

Model	Load capacity	Reach at wrist
TX2-60	4.5 kg	670 mm
TX2-60L	3.7 kg	920 mm
TX2-90	14 kg	1000 mm
TX2-90L	12 kg	1200 mm
TX2-90XL	7 kg	1450 mm

All five models share the six degrees of freedom and ±0.02 mm repeatability given in “At a glance” above.

Common to both families

Protection class (EN 60529)	IP65, and IP67 with the pressurized version
Attachment	360° mounting possibility
Controller	CS9
Modular safety SIL 3 / PL e	Optional

360° mounting is more useful than it sounds in a lab cell: the arm can be inverted or wall-mounted, which frequently buys back the deck space a floor-standing pedestal would have taken.

Sensitive-environment versions

Stäubli publishes cleanroom versions of its six-axis arms in two grades: ISO 14644-1 Class 2 for the Super Cleanroom (SCR) version and Class 4 for the Cleanroom (CR) version, corresponding to FS 209E Subclass 1 and Class 10 respectively. ESD-compatible four- and six-axis robots are published for electronic assembly, testing and packaging, and the HE versions are published for humid environments. Stäubli also publishes dedicated pharmaceutical ranges — Accesspharma, Stericlean and Stericlean+ — covering the pharma grades.

Safety

Stäubli states that the TX2 series is equipped with optional SIL 3 / PL e safety functionality, and that this enables safe and efficient human-robot collaboration without sacrificing productivity. Note that this is an option, not a default: a TX2 without the safety option is an industrial arm that expects to be guarded, and the arms in this range move at up to 11.6 m/s at the wrist.

Stäubli publishes the separate TX2touch range as its power cobot line; the arms this driver serves are not that.

None of the above removes the need for a risk assessment of your own cell. The guarding, the interlocks, the access routes and the labware are yours to assess — and with a kilogram-class payload moving at industrial speed, that assessment is the load-bearing part of the installation, not paperwork after the fact.

How Revolution uses it

A Stäubli arm is a mover, and movers are not driven by device operations. Revolution schedules plate transfers and the mover executes them through the transfer system, in the same way as the Thermo Orbitor and the PF400. There is no “move plate” operation to call from a method — you describe where labware needs to be, and the scheduler works out the moves.

The driver exposes two operations, and both are maintenance actions rather than motion:

• Clear gripper calibration — discard the stored gripper calibration, so it is re-established rather than trusted
• Start teach application — launch the driver’s teaching application to define or correct the arm’s positions

The driver also holds its own initialisation sequence and a configurable decision about what to do if it finds labware in the gripper when it initialises: set the object down, or fail initialisation. That choice matters after an aborted run — the safe answer depends on whether the deck below the arm is where that plate belongs.

Integration

Revolution connects to the Stäubli CS8 controller over TCP/IP.

Prerequisites

• The arm must be commissioned with Stäubli’s own tooling and taught its positions before Revolution schedules transfers through it. Position teaching is instrument-side work; a mover that has not been taught a position cannot be scheduled to it.
• Every instrument the arm serves must be inside the reach of the model fitted, and inside the joint limits the driver enforces.
• Labware weight must be within the load capacity of the model fitted.
• The CS8 controller must be reachable on the network from the Revolution host.

Device configuration

Property	Purpose
CS8 Host	Address of the Stäubli CS8 controller
CS8 Port	Port the controller’s interface listens on

The driver carries its own per-joint motion envelope — maximum velocity, acceleration and joint limits for all six joints — as driver configuration rather than reading it from the controller. If your arm is not the model the driver was configured against, that envelope needs reviewing with us before the arm is put to work.

If you need more of this instrument driven from a schedule, get in touch — the driver is extended on demand.