Title: An open embedded industrial robot hardware and software architecture applied to position control and visual servoing application

Authors: Lin Zhang; Peter Slaets; Herman Bruyninckx

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leuven, Box 2420, Celestijnenlaan 300, Heverlee (Leuven), B-3001, Belgium ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leuven, Box 2420, Celestijnenlaan 300, Heverlee (Leuven), B-3001, Belgium ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leuven, Box 2420, Celestijnenlaan 300, Heverlee (Leuven), B-3001, Belgium

Abstract: This paper presents an open embedded hardware and software architecture for industrial robot control applied to visual servoing system. This architecture is a hardware and software co-design where embedded processors drive the FPGA for motor control. It is robot type independent, as long as the motors are equipped with incremental position encoders and driven by PWM signals. Low cost, low power consumption, high stability, flexibility and expandability are the key advantages. The architecture and related IP cores are developed through a component-based design model which interprets a mechatronic system by computation, communication, configuration and coordination components, together with composition of these components and blackboxes. The motor controller IP core is provided in the consistency of open hardware. Open software implies the use of OROCOS (Bruyninckx, 2001). The performance of visual servoing behaviour is evaluated by visual coupling of a Performer MK2 robot and a KUKA lightweight robot.

Keywords: field programmable gate arrays; FPGA; hardware architecture; software architecture; robot control; embedded systems; visual servoing; component-based design; modelling; position control; motor control; co-design; mechatronics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMA.2014.059775

International Journal of Mechatronics and Automation, 2014 Vol.4 No.1, pp.63 - 72

Received: 22 Oct 2012
Accepted: 12 Nov 2013
Published online: 17 Jun 2014 *

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