A flexible high performance robot arm controller

A robot arm controller was developed with a dual emphasis on performance and flexibility. It includes a general-purpose interface for a host microcomputer, and can be configured with up to two floating-point signal processors. The controller responds to high-level control commands from the host, computes the arm trajectory, and corrects motion errors in real time using Newton-Euler equations. By relieving the host computer of all computational requirements, this controller design permits one host to control multiple robot arms while maintaining maximum performance