Fig 1 - Hardware configuration of the open architecture robot controller
High performance robot systems are essential to reduce the difficulty in building up flexible manufacturing systems and in implementing highly desirable off-line-programming techniques. Industrial robots used today, in general, have only achieved limited success in attaining flexible manufacturing requirements. Attempts to improve robot performance have been made in the areas of robot calibration, external sensor integration and developing advanced dynamic control algorithms. These efforts to improve robot performance have led to the demand of open architecture robot controllers that offer both substantial computational power and system reconfiguration capability for advanced robot system applications.
Fig 1 - Hardware configuration of the open architecture robot controller
To provide such a versatile and high performance robot control platform, an open architecture robot controller based on parallel computing technology has been developed which features high computational power, flexible configurations, and versatile external sensor integration interfaces and protocols. As illustrated in the accompanying figure, the controller hardware consists of an MC68030 SBC and a transputer based array. Software implementation is oriented to the transputer-MC68030 SBC interactions, making possible the dynamic reconfiguration of the system. The controller has the capability to link and de-link dynamically to an external sensor which, depending on application requirements, can be interfaced to servo-control, path control or task control modules of the robot system.
The work was sponsored by EPSRC in a research program aimed at achieving dynamic stereo-visual robot guidance to overcome some uncertainties in manufacturing environment.
Dr Nongji Chen
email: nchen@ndsuk.com
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Last change: January 2000
