Running an industrial robot from a typical personal computer

Abstract

In this paper a software architecture, designed to explore and control an industrial robot from a usual personal computer, is briefly presented and explained. Actual robot control systems are position controllers and therefore have no force control capabilities. The software presented can be used to add force control to the robot system, by closing a force control loop around the inner position control loop. That was the primary objective of this work. In the process several other tools were designed for easy application development and connectivity to standard commercial mathematical and data analysis applications. Those tools include: an ActiveX object used to communicate with the robot control system and expose its RPC services, an ActiveX object used to access and configure the force/torque sensor, several RAPID applications designed to add new services and an DDE server designed to enable sensor and robot access from DDE client applications. A Matlab toolbox was also designed to operate with our robot. The above referred tools are briefly introduced. This work is closely related with the robot/controller used. Nevertheless, the ideas presented can be easily implemented with other robots/controllers since many of them provide the same type of remote access and implement similar remote services. The software was designed to run under Windows platforms, preferably Windows NT.