An experimental testbed for position and force control of robotic manipulators

In this paper a low cost open architecture PC-based controller for a planar two-degree of freedom robotic manipulator is described. The system is based on an available low price commercial PC interface board and all of the control software runs on a Pentium 100 MHz computer to control the arm. The driving kernel of software for supervisory, management and control was developed in a high level language (C++) and enables the analysis of several position and force/position control strategies for research and practical applications. The preliminary experimental results for the given tracking trajectories reveal an accurate position tracking performance and have shown also good force control results in the presence of a non-rigid environment, with conventional digital PID controllers