RIPS: a platform for experimental real-time sensory-based robot control

The design and performance benchmarking of the prototype robotic instruction processing systems (RIPS) at the Center for Robotic Systems in Microelectronics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, is discussed. The architecture of RIPS is specifically geared for robot control, yet the system is general and fully programmable and does not assume any manipulator characteristics. RIPS provides sufficient computing capacity to attack important real-time sensory-based robot control problems. Compliant control, multiple manipulator coordination, and manufacturing cell-level integration are presently under study. Experimental testing in these areas is possible because of RIPS´ high computational performance for robot control problems: a Stanford manipulator using the computed torque method can be controlled with an update time of 255 μs. This time includes inverse kinematics, dynamic compensation, and proportional derivative servoing for the six-degrees-of-freedom manipulator