Pc Based Control Systems For Compliance Control And Intuitive Programming Of Industrial Robots

Nowadays, high costs of automation technologies, sustainable only in manufacturing markets with large volume production and intensive capitals, do not allow a widespread application of Robotics to Small Medium Enterprises (SME). To face such a problem the need of low-cost and not-proprietary solutions at all level of the robot work cell is mandatory. Focusing on the robot control system, two aspects can be addressed to reduce its life cycle costs. Firstly, during the Research & Development activities, more openness allows to design, develop and integrate functionalities quickly, reacting to market changes with few engineering efforts both in term of cost and time; secondly, during the common use of the control system, providing intuitive interfaces for robot programming let the robot end user not to rely on high skilled operators who require specific knowledge for each specific system with expensive efforts in personnel training. In this paper, the above mentioned aspects are addressed proposing a PC and open source software based control architecture for robot controllers. Such an architecture has been used to test compliance strategies; specifically, this work shows the implementation of teaching by demonstration based on manual guidance using a force/torque (F/T) sensor and a wireless joy-pad. The same algorithms used on the PC-based controller have been applied to an industrial robot controller in order to accomplish a manual guidance based on the motor currents feedback.