Microcontroller-based architecture for control of a six joint robot arm

A robot arm controller has been 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