A methodology for implementing the CPAC approach to path tracking with Six-DOF robotic manipulators

To serve expanding machine and industrial automation requirement, many control languages are included into industrial system design. There is a well-known standard of industrial control language IEC61131-3. It covers both PLC control and process control fields. Although the IEC61131-3 based industrial control systems have been launched 10 years before, it is still empty for industrial robotic manipulators control fields. Robot suppliers like YASAKAWA still have closed-architecture as black box, in which it is difficult for end-user to improve and realize new tracking algorithms. So many users chose PC based white box controller instead, however, normally it cannot satisfy RT (real-time) requirement that many robot tracking algorithms belong to time-based approaches. Hence, in this paper, the authors firstly present CPAC (Computerized Programmable Automation Controller) approach to design open-architecture IEC61131-3 based RT control system for industrial robotic manipulators. It could apply some existed tracking algorithms into RT kernel under PC's open architecture; the model of six-DOF robot is represented. The major work of this paper is: comparing CPAC approach and PC based approach by two general complex robot tracking algorithms. Later the simulation results and experiments results conducted on six-DOF Industrial robotic manipulator was shown to prove CPAC approach has good performance in general.