Development of a compact motor controller supporting EtherCAT for a dual-arm telepresence robot

This paper proposes a compact embedded motor controller that can be mounted in a robot arm. Three different control modes are implemented in the controller: torque, velocity, and position. It supports EtherCAT network for real-time control whose control frequency is faster than 1kHz for 18 network nodes under Linux Xenomai operating system. The compact controllers are mounted inside an 18-DOFs dual-arm telepresence robot for smart shape design. Finally, the robot is connected with a master haptic device Omega-6 and showed successful tele-operation performance.