Integrating multiple sensors and industrial robots: system architecture and control aspects

To improve the integration of sensors and robots, a system architecture that defines information processing in closed-loop sensor applications is proposed. The bandwidth of the control loop is increased by introducing additional underlying signal paths. This flexible system architecture reduces the deadtime problem by establishing additional underlying signal paths and allows the use of standard industrial robot controls with minor modifications. To be compatible to existing industrial robot controls, all sensor related tasks are transferred to the corresponding sensor computers. A separate sensor control unit is introduced as the main interface between the different sensors and the robot control. It performs the specific operations which are necessary for the adaptation to a given application, including data fusion in multiple sensor systems