Experimental validation of a simple architecture for force/torque and vision control in a 6-dof industrial robot

Industrial robots use closed proprietary controller architecture that prevents the prototyping of advanced control algorithms when new sensor, such as force/torque or vision sensors, are used. The main bottleneck, apart from the closed architecture, consists in the real-time nature of the control task, that set tight temporal constraints usually unattainable by the limited sampling rate of force and vision sensors. The aim of this paper is to present and test a low-cost simple architecture able to perform both force/torque and vision-in-the-loop control, using an industrial COMAU Smart S2 6-dof articulated manipulator. Successful experiments were performed with various force control tasks and vision-based tracking of planar moving optical marks.