Key Technology Research And Development On Digital Representation Of Manipulators With Controller Hardware In The Loop

Industrial robot controllers are suffering from their pain points in R&D,testing,and training.In the aspect of R&D,the development mode of carrying a load of the physical body directly takes time and effort.It is difficult to control the physical body safely at the early stage of the development process.In the aspect of testing,the current testing method is the controller tested with a specific physical body,which is an overall testing scheme.If the controller,which is one of the three main components of industrial robots,wants to be tested solely,unified standards will be tough to maintain,due to the manufacture differences in the body,mechanical wearing,and the changing of the testing environment.In the aspect of training and education,the construction of a training center equipped with a large number of physical robots is expensive.Moreover,directly training with real machines for the beginner also increases the risk of equipment damage due to improper operations.In other words,currently in the R&D,testing and training fields of industrial robot controllers are sharing the same need,which points to a safely-using and low-cost applying objects with ”standard” behavior and reaction similar to real robots.With the target of satisfying the demand,this study adopted Ether CAT communication technology,3D graphics simulation technology and the Hardware-in-the-loop simulation technology to construct a controller in the loop simulation experiment platform for serial robots,i.e.”digital robot” system.Besides relevant key technology research and experimental prototype development have been performed.It mainly includes the following research contents:(1)The system scheme of ”digital robot” has been proposed.The workflow of importing and using the ”digital robot” system has been set up to handle those newly imported industrial robots with multiple series configurations and different types.This workflow enhances the wide applicability of the proposed ”hardware + software” system in this research,reducing the barriers for usage.(2)The Network Interface Card(NIC)using Ether CAT communication technology has been developed as the physical connection role between the Industrial Personal Computer(IPC)and the 3rd-party robot controller based on Ether CAT real-time control,so as to realize the virtual digital representation of robot to receive control instructions from the controller and feedback the information of its theoretical response behavior.(3)Based on the classical theory of kinematics and dynamics of robotics,a virtual digital representation of robot,i.e.”digital robot”,which is suitable for serial industrial manipulators of various types and configurations has been established.The virtual digital representation of the industrial robot operates on the NIC-installed IPC with the form of embedded software and is stimulated by the control instructions from the 3rd-party real industrial robot controller,simulating the ”standard” behavior of the real industrial robot.(4)Plenty of reasonable auxiliary tools have been designed and implemented,conveniently and efficiently providing abundant testing use cases.A carefully designed excitation trajectory can be used to test the capability of the controller of the real robot,while the collision-free excitation trajectories,which were automatically generated with efficiency,can be utilized to conveniently examine the overall performance of the 3rdparty tested controller.This ”digital robot” system can provide a unified test platform for the controller testing,a safe and easy control object for the early functional research and development of the prototype,and a low-cost learning object conforming to the theoretical behavior of the robot for training and education.