Design And Implementation Of Industrial Robot Teaching Pendant Hardware Platform Based On Cortex-A8

In order to apply industrial robots in different field, high requests have been proposed for improving the performance of industrial robot teaching pendant, as one of industrial robots optional pieces. Teaching pendant is used to handle the teaching procedure, which mainly consists of manual teaching and online programming. Manual teaching includes controlling the movement of robot hand to reach the specified spot, adjusting the posture of arms and recording the position information. And online programming is used to control the robot to move along the trajectory in circulation.There are several problems existing in hardware system of common industrial robots teaching pendant, such as single function, troublesome on-site operation, insufficient resources for application development in upper layer, slow and unstable communication between master and slave devices. To solve these problems, a high-performance and universal industrial robot teaching pendant hardware system, based on Cortex-A8 and Android operating system, has been designed and realized in this thesis. The thesis is organized as follows:Demand of teaching pendant hardware and structure of robot hardware platform from home and abroad have been analysed and investigated at first. Considering the highperformance of Cortex-A8, an overall design scheme and hardware solutions for subfunction modules have been proposed, based on Cortex-A8 and Android operating system.Secondly, the cost-effective robot teaching pendant hardware platform with multifunction has been designed in detail, by making full use of abundant peripheral resources and taking advantage of excellent performance with low power consumption in the Cortex-A8. In addition, the reliability of this hardware platform has been analysed in the aspects of PCB laminate design, global signal layout and process of significant signals in high speed.Then after research on the basic framework and basic principle of Android operating system, transplantation of U-Boot, Android kernel and Android filesystem have been completed. By modifying Android kernel configuration, the filesystem supported UBIFS format. Automatic solidification of Android operating system has been realized by readwrite operation of NAND FLASH in U-Boot. For solving the problem about slow start-up of Android operating system, the procedure of start-up has been optimized after analysing each stage in start-up, and start-up time has been shorten.Finally, an overall test has been done to the industrial robot teaching pendant hardware system with the robot motion controller, which mainly focused on testing communication functions and modules including LCD, touch panel, USB, and making a comparison with the time of start-up before Android optimization and after. The result shows that each moudule work fine, start-up time of Android system has been shorten.