How to Cope with a Closed Industrial Robot Control: a Practical Implementation for a 6-dof Articulated Robot

Abstract Robot manufacturers use simple algorithms (such as PID) to control industrial manipulators. The controller architecture and the algorithm parameters are closed to any change from external users. This is often unacceptable in teaching or research environments. In this paper a simple and inexpensive architecture is presented for the COMAU Smart 82 6dof manipulator, aimed at introducing the possibility to integrate external sensors, such as force/torque sensors or CCD cameras for advanced control tasks. The main difficulty is to cope with the temporal limits introduced by the limited sampling rate attainable by such an architecture. Experiments were performed using a force/torque sensor to test the strengths and limits of the proposed architecture.