Transputer-based robot control system for six-joint robot manipulators

A transputer-based robot control system was designed and built to control an industrial robot PUMA 560. The goal was to develop a research tool for the investigation of practical and theoretical aspects of various advanced control strategies in the robot system. A transputer network consisting of thirteen transputers is employed for the application, where the parallelization of the algorithms is utilized for speeding up the computation. The kinematics, path planning and a collision avoidance module associated with a vision system are implemented on the network. Six joint controller modules were designed and constructed to handle input/output signals from the joint motors of the robot manipulator. The advanced multitransputer structure is capable of integrating the extern sensor information in a simple way and implementing control algorithms in parallel processes. For Software development, the parallel programming language Occam is used. The code development is performed on an IBM-PC-based toolset system.