A multiprocessor-based controller for the control of mechanical manipulators

This paper describes a cost effective architecture for the control of mechanical manipulators based on a functional decomposition of the equations of motion of a manipulator. The Lagrange-Euler formulation and the Newton-Euler formulation were considered for the decomposition. The functional decomposition separated the inertial, Coriolis, centrifugal and gravity terms of the Lagrange-Euler equations of motion. The Newton-Euler equations of motion lent themselves to being decomposed to the terms used to generate the recursive forward and backward equations. Architectures tuned to the functional flow of the two algorithms were examined. An architecture which meets our design criteria is proposed. The proposed controller architecture can best be described as a macro level pipeline with parallelism within elements of the pipeline. The pipeline is designed to take maximum benefit of the serial nature of the Newton-Euler equations of motion.