Design of the IRIS facility-a modular, reconfigurable and expandable robot test bed

The integrated raster imaging system (IRIS) facility is a robot system to be used for experiments in grasping, manipulation and force control. The facility has two manipulators with four rotary joints each. Each manipulator can assume a multitude of configurations. Each joint is driven by DC brushless motors coupled with harmonic cup drives, and instrumented with position and torque sensors. A six-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) force/torque sensor is mounted at the tip link. The real-time controller of the IRIS facility is based on a nodal architecture. Each node is capable of controlling 8 joints at 1 kHz while executing over 1000-FP (floating point) operations per joint in each sampling method. The design of the IRIS facility and its functional capabilities are described. In addition, the rationale behind the major design decisions is given