PC-based control industrial robot arm

Posted by Bruce on March 13, 2007, 10:59 pm

Hi,
How can using a stardard PC to control the movement of a real
industrial robot, for instance:PUMA.
Did I need some special library of this robot? If yes, How can I get
one?

Tks.
bruce

Posted by Joe Strout on March 13, 2007, 11:43 pm

> How can using a stardard PC to control the movement of a real
> industrial robot, for instance:PUMA.
> Did I need some special library of this robot? If yes, How can I get
> one?

Without direct experience, I'd hazard to guess that you'd ask
the manufacturer of the robot for it.

Posted by news on March 14, 2007, 8:55 am

joe-60B997.21432413032007@comcast.dca.giganews.com...

> > How can using a stardard PC to control the movement of a real
> > industrial robot, for instance:PUMA.
> > Did I need some special library of this robot? If yes, How can I get
> > one?

> Without direct experience, I'd hazard to guess that you'd ask
> the manufacturer of the robot for it.

Good luck, Unimation, the PUMA manufacturer, is out of business since the
last eighties.

Posted by vkc on March 14, 2007, 6:31 am

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 19:59 -0700, Bruce wrote:

> Hi,
> How can using a stardard PC to control the movement of a real
> industrial robot, for instance:PUMA.
> Did I need some special library of this robot? If yes, How can I get
> one?

I don't know what level of cofigurability and complexity you desire to
handle, but here goes...

I think there is quite a bit that goes into a PC-based robot control
station. On the hardware side, you will need a I/O board inside the PC
with enough analog, digital I/O and encoder inputs. You will have to
find a way to interface this with the robot controller. For example, I
have used a servo-to-go I/O board (www.servotogo.com) with a TRC-205
amplifier package (see http://pages.prodigy.net/tridentrobotics/ ) to
connect a PC to a Puma560.

The tricky part is the software in my opinion. You will need to
implement a real-time control loop - which may require you to develop
the controller program on top of a real-time operating system such as
QNX or RT-linux. You will also need to develop additional programs such
as a teach-pendant, trajectory generator and so on. There might be motor
amplifier packages out there that connect to a PC USB port (for example)
and has the control-loop and trajectory generation in-built. In this
case, you won't need to deal with the complexity of implementing
real-time loop in the PC.

In addition, you need modelling parameters for forward/inverse
kinematics and dynamics. This is where you will need support from the
robot manufacturer. For standard robots such as the PUMA, these
parameters are well known, and available in public domain. I don't know
of a library that provides all this functionality out of the box. I was
lucky to have worked on the design and development of such a software
when I was a grad student:
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/ece/crb/students/vilas/projects/rp/

Vkc

Posted by Bruce on March 14, 2007, 9:56 am

> On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 19:59 -0700, Bruce wrote:

> > Hi,
> > How can using a stardard PC to control the movement of a real
> > industrial robot, for instance:PUMA.
> > Did I need some special library of this robot? If yes, How can I get
> > one?

> I don't know what level of cofigurability and complexity you desire to
> handle, but here goes...
> I think there is quite a bit that goes into a PC-based robot control
> station. On the hardware side, you will need a I/O board inside the PC
> with enough analog, digital I/O and encoder inputs. You will have to
> find a way to interface this with the robot controller. For example, I
> have used a servo-to-go I/O board (www.servotogo.com) with a TRC-205
> amplifier package (seehttp://pages.prodigy.net/tridentrobotics/ ) to
> connect a PC to a Puma560.
> The tricky part is the software in my opinion. You will need to
> implement a real-time control loop - which may require you to develop
> the controller program on top of a real-time operating system such as
> QNX or RT-linux. You will also need to develop additional programs such
> as a teach-pendant, trajectory generator and so on. There might be motor
> amplifier packages out there that connect to a PC USB port (for example)
> and has the control-loop and trajectory generation in-built. In this
> case, you won't need to deal with the complexity of implementing
> real-time loop in the PC.
> In addition, you need modelling parameters for forward/inverse
> kinematics and dynamics. This is where you will need support from the
> robot manufacturer. For standard robots such as the PUMA, these
> parameters are well known, and available in public domain. I don't know
> of a library that provides all this functionality out of the box. I was
> lucky to have worked on the design and development of such a software
> when I was a grad

student:http://www.ces.clemson.edu/ece/crb/students/vilas/projects/rp/

> Vkc

Thank you very much! Vkc. The information is really useful for me to
understand the pc-based robot control station,especailly the three
website addresses.

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http://robot.pro <- domain name "robot.pro" for sale
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2007-11-13

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General Robotics Forum
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