The Design and Development of an Interactive Teaching Tool for Robotics and Control System Course Using Rapid Control Prototyping Solution

Control systems of robot manipulators offer many challenges in education where the students must learn robot dynamics and control structures, and understand relations between the control parameters, and the systems performance. Interactive simulation is aimed at improving the understanding and intuition for the abstract parts of the control of robot courses. Implementation of the control design on a robot manipulator significantly impress and improve the understanding towards the control system learning. This paper presents an application of interactive simulation designed by using the National Instrument’s (NI) LabVIEW to teach control systems of robots by using the Rapid Control Prototyping method. The application considers a nonlinear robot arm and two control modules: computed torque control and PID control. For the computed torque control module, user can directly manipulate graphical representation of the systems such as choice in controller gains, desired trajectories and obtain instant feedback on the effects. PID control module will be the implementation on PID control to a well-developed 2 degree of freedom (DOF) planar robot arm through NI MyRIO-1900. User can visualize the performance of the real robotic system and manipulate the control parameters through user interface. These features make the interactive learning tool stimulating and of high pedagogical value.