Research On Techniques Of Open Architecture Robot Controller

Most of the conventional robot controllers are designed with closed natures, such as non-standard hardware interface, customized communication protocol and special program language. It is difficult and expensive to modify a closed controller to integrate external hardware and software. The closed controller architecture is lacking in flexibility and imposes disadvantageous effect on robotic industry and research. This has led to the demand for controllers based on open architecture. This dissertation mainly aims to implement an open architecture robot controller. Some relative fields are researched, including hardware structure, software platform and control technology.An approach has been proved to be effective in designing the open architecture controller. This is that an open architecture controller should be constructed by interface-based modular models designed in defacto standard hardware and software techniques. According to this principle, we propose the functional component model of robot. By using this model, the functional architecture of a robot controller is analyzed. The real time performance of the controller is also considered. A real time extension is added on the general OS to support the real time operations. Based on this OS platform, the communication mechanism, configurable connection and run-time schedule of the components in an open architecture controller are researched.To implement the open architecture controller, a Movemaster-EX RMV1 type robot is used as an experiment platform. The old proprietary controller and kinematics of the robot are analyzed. And then a PC+DSP scheme is proposed to modify the hardware structure. Some details of the interface and driver are described. A design scheme of DSP based multi-axis motion controller is presented. And its open characteristics are discussed also. To improve the performance of joint control, an on-line gravity compensation algorithm is designed and applied to the joints drove by DC motors.A basic off-line program subsystem is realized based on the open architecture. The 3D modeling and collision detection are two emphases. With the object-oriented method, graphical user interfaces are designed to support the fast 3D modeling of robot by simple menu operations. On collision detection, the distance computation algorithm base on Voronoi space is exploited to make a quick interference judgment. Sensor simulation and robot program are also considered in this subsystem. And a theoretical implementation of vision simulation is presented.A three-tier architecture is presented to integrate multi-sensor in the open robot controller. Exploiting this integration method and considering the essence of deliberative /reactive control approaches, an integrated control architecture for multi-sensor robot is proposed. This architecture ensures that the robot can adapt to environment changes while achieving the planned goal. An experimental system according to this architecture is constructed.