The Control System Of A Palletizing Robots Based On RTAI And EtherMAC Real-time Industrial Ethernet

As one of the cutting-edge technologies used in manufacturing industry and automation industry, the robot technology has demonstrated outstanding performance in improving the level of productivity, reducing the labor intensity, improving repeat machining accuracy, and so on. With the exceptional performance of flexible manufacturing, palletizing multiple material stacks and handling multiple materials, palletizing robots become more and more popular and occupy the market quickly.The aim of this paper is to set up a control platform for the palletizing robot. According to the mechanism of the robot, this paper illustrates the functional request of the platform, and therefore the motor selection and workspace of the robot. As for the motion control, this paper develops a mathematic model of the mechanical construction of the robot and further sets up the nonlinear equations for kinematics of the robot rather than use the traditional inverse kinematic algorithm. The nonlinear equations are solved via Newton iteration on high performance computer. As the working speed is high and the working load is heavy for the robot, this paper develops an algorithm based on s-shape curve to reduce the impact.The hardware platform is designed based on the EtherMAC, a real-time communication protocol based on Ethernet. Industrial PC communicates with slave control node under standard Ethernet protocol. Slave node connects motion drive and I/Os via Ethernet and is responsible for sending the control data and collecting feedback data. The software platform is designed for Windows CE6.0, a real-time operating system of Co. Microsoft. The architecture of the software platform is based on modules, such as motion control module, human-computer interaction module, and so on.Another contribution of this paper is the development of a real-time operating system based on RTAI kernel and Linux kernel. By modifying the handling method of internet frame in the Linux source code, this paper establishes a real-time communication module in Linux platform.