An FPGA-Based Open Architecture Industrial Robot Controller

Most robot controllers are proprietary and, therefore, they have a closed architecture, and it is typical for robot vendors not to provide support for old control units; hence, when a deprecated robot requires an update or even a simple preventive maintenance, the manufacturer tends to recommend disposing such a unit and to acquire a new one. In this paper, the development of a field programmable gate array-based motion control system is described as part of an open-architecture and vendor-independent control system tested on a Fanuc S420F. As a way to measure the performance of the developed system, an experimental test is carried out to achieve a path tracking RMS error lower than 20 mm at a Cartesian velocity of 500 mm/s. Results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves the same feed rates as the original controller with the significant advantage of being modular, flexible, scalable, and reconfigurable.