Open software/hardware architecture for advanced force/position control of an industrial robot

In an academic and research environment, open control architectures are crucial for evaluating new control laws and multi-sensor integration. Unfortunately, most commercial robot manufacturers do not provide open control architectures. To deal with this issue, in this paper the open architecture of the Catalyst-5 robot manipulator manufactured by Thermo Scientific is presented. The original control box was replaced by a custom-made controller fitted with servo drives and additional electronics to manipulate encoders and control the robot manipulator. A data acquisition card is located inside of a PC, which in turn hosts the control law. To validate the performance of the proposed open architecture a force/position controller based on the principle of orthogonalization was implemented. Experimental results demonstrate that the present open software/hardware control architecture is suitable and reliable for the implementation of complex tasks involving advanced control strategies.