Design of an integrated environment for operation and control of robotic arms (non-reviewed)

As more advanced control algorithms are becoming available for the control of robotic arms, traditional fixed controller boards and associated code generators are becoming less convenient way to test such control algorithms in real-time. The process of using such boards is complex, time consuming, and inflexible. In this work, an integrated hardware-software environment was developed and presented where researchers can simply use any Matlab/Simulink basic function block and/or toolbox, such as fuzzy logic or neural network, to design, implement, and test different controller algorithms in real-time for robotic arm operations. The hardware includes a computer, the dSPACE-ds1103 digital processing board, an amplifier board, and the Zebra-ZERO robotics arm as a test-bed. Also, Matlab GUI, m-file, Matlab/Simulink blocks, and dSPACE interface functions are combined together to form the software environment. Control algorithms can be designed in the Matlab/Simulink then converted to c-code and download to the dSPACE processing board. The Matlab m-file are used to code the arm inverse kinematics model and the path planning to calculate the joint angles then send them to the dSPACE processing board using the dSPACE interface functions. Finally, the dSPACE processing board generates physical signal to control the robot arm in real-time. The proposed hardware-software components are developed and integrated together, and several control algorithms can be tested on it. The development steps and some of the real-time testing results conducted on the hardware are explained next in this extended abstract.