Design of a robot control architecture

A real-time modular control architecture for robot control has been developed for reconfigurable machines. The proliferation of communication buses such as fieldbuses for factory and machine operation has necessitated the need for uniformity and standardization. Although Ethernet stands out as the most ubiquitous, its non-real time property renders it unsuitable for device level communication where real-time is required. Given this challenge, our research imposes traffic management schemes in order to realize a real-time effect. An enabling feature is a switched Ethernet using UDP/IP. Each machine axis is controlled by a real-time Java micro-controller and all the controllers communicate through the Ethernet communication network. The architecture is designed to support reconfiguration of both hardware and software resources by the use of modularity and service-discovery schemes in the software and hardware design. Therefore devices such as axis and sensors may be reorganized, removed or added easily. The underpinnings of the object-oriented software include communication and computation architectures. The architecture can be configured to operate in different group communication schemes, i.e., client-sever, or multi-peer, depending on the task requirements.