A general 6-DOF industrial robot arm control system based on Linux and FPGA

This paper presents a general six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) robot arm control system based on Linux and field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The system provides a friendly human-computer interaction interface. It can complete palletizing, handling and other processes through simple programming of the interactive interface. We adopt industrial personal computer (IPC) as the controller to accomplish the kinematics calculation, design motion control board connected with the controller and the servo system, and use the servo system to implement the motion of the robot arm. The kinematics calculation and trajectory generation based on cubic polynomial are developed based on the Linux system, which improves the portability of the program. And a normal method is adopted in updating trajectory points to improve repeatability. Motion control board is designed based on FPGA, which with the characteristic of parallel computing raises the running speed of the robot arm.