Embedded FPGA controller for robot arm in material handling using reconfigurable nicompact RIO

This paper deals with the position control of robot arm for material handling in product based manufacturing industries. The robot arm is designed using two DC servo motors coupled with quadrature encoder which provides mobility with two degrees of freedom. The end effector of the arm is a core and coil arrangement which is used to pick and place materials at desired position. PID controller is developed to position the servo motor at required angle based on material location and activates the end effector to handle the material. The controller is designed in embedded FPGA architecture of National Instruments CompactRIO (NI cRIO-9073) and interfaced with motors through NI 9505 DC servo drive modules. The speed and resolution of position control is high due to on-board 40 MHz clock frequency and parallel execution of logical blocks in RIO FPGA. CompactRIO is programmed with NI LabVIEW graphical programming tool which minimizes the programming complexity.