DSP/FPGA-based Controller Architecture for Flexible Joint Robot with Enhanced Impedance Performance

Some practical issues associated with enhancing the Cartesian impedance performance of flexible joint manipulator are investigated. A digital signal processing/field programmable gate array (DSP/FPGA) structure is proposed to realize the singular perturbation based impedance controller. To increase the bandwidth of torque control and minimize the joint torque ripple, boundary layer system and field-oriented control (FOC) are fully implemented in a FPGA of each joint. The kernel of the hardware system is a peripheral component interface (PCI)-based high speed floating-point DSP for the Cartesian level control, and FPGA for high speed (200 us cycle time) multipoint low-voltage differential signaling (M-LVDS) serial data bus communication between robot Cartesian level and joint level. Experimental results with a four-degree-of-freedom flexible-joint manipulator under constrained-motion task, demonstrate that the controller architecture can enhance the robot impedance performance effectively.