Design of robot joint servo development system

The performance of an industrial robot depends heavily on the performance of its joint servo. In order to design a better robot joint servo system, the performance of the system needs to be monitored in a real-time environment such that the servo parameters can be adjusted to achieve the optimum performance. Therefore, a robot joint servo development system with real-time monitoring capability is needed. As to the design of such system, since computational requirement is imperative to the performace of a robot system such that the choice of the microprocessor for the digital control of a robot servo system is a crucial factor. This paper presents the detailed design of a robot servo development system based on a microprocessor with architectures optimized for high speed numeric computations, the Texas Instruments TMS320. Based on the designed system, the servo parameters for the designed servo system can be optimized by monitoring the servo performance.