High-level robot programming in a pc-based control environment

In the last few years, the wide availability of computing power and operating systems with real-time capabilities offered the chance to develop low-cost PC-based solutions for motion control; this made possible to overcome limits in commercial robot controllers for their use is a research context. Moreover, modern scripting languages are becoming more and more powerful. High-level programming permits to easy write code in a smart way and does not require particular skills. In this paper we present the design of a modular architecture for PC-based robot control under the QNX Real Time operating system. The proposed architecture allowed to use the Python programming language as an high-level object oriented scripting tool to program robot motions and to monitor, even remotely, the system. The designed architecture has been employed for the motion control of a 4 d.o.f. reconfigurable parallel robot, and the advantages deriving from the use of a high-level object-oriented robot programming language are shown through the programming of a demonstrative assembling cell of a manufacturing plant.