Industrial robot motion control with real-time Java and EtherCAT

Safe object-oriented programming languages like Java provide a much more programmer-friendly environment than the low-level languages in which real-time and embedded software have traditionally been implemented. Therefore, with the recent popularity of real-time Java, it is interesting to examine its feasibility for robot motion control. We have implemented a motion control system, and an application, for an ABB IRB 340 industrial robot entirely in real-time Java, using standard computer hardware, off-the-shelf EtherCAT servo drives, and the Sun Java Real-Time System 2.0 on Solaris 10. This shows the feasibility of realtime Java for practical robot applications. It also shows one advantage of the EtherCAT field bus technology, that no special master hardware is required. To our knowledge, this is the first robot control system implemented entirely in Java and executed on a certified virtual machine.