Force-Torque Control for an Experimental Robot Controller

At the Department of Automation and Applied Informatics an experimental robot control system has been developed. The full plant consists of an IBM-PC based multiprocessor system connected to the power electronics, the manipulator being a NOKIA-PUMA 560 robot arm. Some parts of the central computer and the whole power electronics are developed at the department. The control system is based on the QNX operating system, and the development is made using the corresponding QNX Momentics development suite. One aim of the research is to integrate a six-component force-torque sensor into the robot control system and to extend the basic position control with force-torque control capabilities. This paper introduces the hardware extensions including the PCI bus interface card and presents the recent features implemented into the advanced robot programming system providing the possibility of executing force-torque control tasks