PLC-based control of a robot manipulator with closed kinematic chain

Author

Bonfè, Marcello ; Vignali, Matteo ; Fiorini, Mario

Author_Institution

Engineering Department, ENDIF, University of Ferrara, Via Saragat 1, 44100, Italy

fYear

2009

fDate

12-17 May 2009

Firstpage

1262

Lastpage

1267

Abstract

The paper describes the design and implementation of a robot control system on a hardware platform based on a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). The controlled robot is a 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulator with a closed kinematic chain, designed for high-performance pick and place applications in a packaging workcell. The control software is fully developed on a commercial PLC system, using its standard programming tools and the multi-tasking features of its operating system. In particular, the paper analyse in detail the drawbacks and the advantages related to the choice of standard PLCs in this kind of applications, compared to the much common choice of specialized hardware or industrial personal computers, with particular emphasis on the computational performances obtained with the proposed control architecture.

Keywords

Application software; Control systems; Hardware; Kinematics; Manipulators; Packaging; Programmable control; Robot control; Software standards; Software tools;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation, 2009. ICRA '09. IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Kobe

ISSN

1050-4729

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2788-8

Electronic_ISBN

1050-4729

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ROBOT.2009.5152281

Filename

5152281