A LOW-COST ROBOT CONTROLLER AND ITS SOFTWARE PROBLEMS

Abstract

In recent years the need for advanced robot control algorithms for industrial robots has grown. The deyelopment of a low-cost robot controller to support the development, implementation and testing of those algorithms which require high computational power was targeted. This paper deals wiith the requirements of an experimental controller that can be connected to a NOKIA PUMA 560 robot arm. It explains the IBM PC compatible host and the TEXAS Digital Signal Processor (DSP) based hardware. On the host computer the UNIX-like QXX real-time operating system is used. In the current phase of development the robot controller works with the classical decentralised joint control based strategy. The Advanced Robot Pogramming System (ARPS) explicit robot programming, language is implementedl.