Robot control system implementation with rapid control prototyping technique

This paper describes a rapid control prototyping (RCP) approach to design and implement a robot control system in a motion simulator. Different from most RCP applications, we apply RCP not only to design the feedback loop control level, but also to the supervisory control level for command-mode switching, event monitoring, and fault detection. All real time software running in the robot controller is developed with MATLAB, SIMULINK, real time workshopreg and xPCTarget from mathworks. The supervisory control functions are presented by the stateflow block diagrams. The complete control system is supplemented with a networked user interface host computer for remote operation, the host computer provides video display, data monitoring, data logging, and real-time 3-D animation to display current robot gesture. The completed system becomes a fully operational system with little modification. The proposed control system could serve as a framework for control applications using the RCP technique