An EtherCAT based real-time centralized soft robot motion controller

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an EtherCAT based centralized soft motion control system for real-time robot control. The system engages EtherCAT as high speed industrial motion network to enable force based motion control in real-time and is composed of Software-based Master Controller and Slave Interface Module. For robot control, hard real-time control capacity is essential to apply for various applications (ex. high speed parallel robot control, etc.). For the real time control, The software-based Master Controller is designed using a real time kernel and EtherCAT network, and servo processes is located in the master controller. The slave interface module just collect and transfer all sensor information of robot to the master controller via the EtherCAT network. It is proven by experimental results that the proposed soft motion control system has real time controllability for robot control.