Motion Control Firmware for High-Speed Robotic Systems

This paper addresses the hardware and software platforms of high-speed robot control systems, which are usually integrated with multimodal sensing, multiaxis motion, and complex algorithmic capabilities. In this paper, robot control is considered from numerical processor chip architecture, board-level features, to software development cycles. Various numerical processors ranging from general purpose processors to digital signal processors are examined. This is followed by a review of the common motion control boards. Cross platform and upward compatible software development are addressed. Finally, an example application of real-time slewing control of a high-speed industrial robot is provided