Embedded Control System for a 5-DOF Manipulator by Means of SPI Bus

Abstract

This paper presents SPI based embedded control system for a 5-DOF industrial robot manipulator. A set of microcontrollers is used to perform the control task; each one computes its own control signal to achieve joint movements. The embedded system has an 8-bit microcontroller master-slave scheme, with one master driving 5 slaves, in order to exchange control information by means of SPI network. Functionality tests are carried out by implementing a digital PID control algorithm on a Scorbot robot and results are presented. The developed embedded system provides a low cost, flexible and high effective solution for implementation of control algorithms.