A robot controller based on multiple digital signal processors

The authors present a master-slave robot controller which uses multiple high-speed digital signal processors to compute the dynamic equations of a robot manipulator. Based on the analysis of computational schemes for the dynamic equations, a practical computational scheme of the full dynamic equations is proposed for the controller. For the five degree-of-freedom articulate mechanical manipulator being studied, the parallel scheme proposed here can reduce the computation time and the computational interval of the full dynamic equations to 4 ms or less. If the pipelined/parallel approach is used, the computational interval may be reduced to 2 ms or less. In addition, the structure of the controller makes reconfiguration very easy