Development of a FPGA-based motion control IC for robot arm

A new generation of field programmable gate array (FPGA) technologies enables to integrate an embedded processor IP (intellectual property) and an application IP into a SoPC (system-on-a-programmable-chip) environment. A motion control IC for robot arm based on the SoPC environment is presented in this paper. The FPGA-based motion control IC has two IPs, a Nios embedded processor IP and an application IP. The Nios processor is used to perform the function of the command generation, the inverse kinematic computation and the point-to-point motion control. The application IP is used to perform the functions of the five axis position control of the robot arm. The former is implemented by software due to the complicated control algorithm and low sampling frequency control (less than 100 Hz). The latter is implemented by hardware due to the need of high sampling frequency control (control loop: 1 kHz, PWM peripheral circuit: 4~8 MHz) but simple computation. At last, an experimental system has been set up and some experimental results have been demonstrated