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 workshop^reg 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