Development of a Multi-DOF Robotic Controller for Academic Purposes

This article presents the development of a robotic controller for technical training, academic teaching, and research. The controller was designed to interact from 1 to 6 Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) serial robotic arms, actuated by brushed DC servomotors equipped with incremental encoders. Controller architecture is based on four components: a processor, a reconfigurable FPGA, measurement I/O hardware and software. Functionality of the robotic controller has been proved by means of the interaction with an SCARA robot arm. The proposed controller presents the potential to teach technical courses (like Robotics, Control, Electronics and Programming) and to implement and validate advanced control algorithms.