Design of a Real-time Robot Control System oriented for Human-Robot Cooperation

• Published in: 2021 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Electromechanical Automation (AIEA) pp. 23 - 29
• Main Authors: Xi, Qiang, Zheng, Chang W., Yao, Mao Y., Kou, Wei, Kuang, Shao L.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2021
• Subjects: Collaboration; EtherCAT; Hardware; Heuristic algorithms; Human-robot cooperation; Open interface; Real-time robot control system; Real-time systems; Robot control; Robot kinematics; Software; Xenomai
• DOI: 10.1109/AIEA53260.2021.00013

An open real-time control system based on the EtherCAT fieldbus communication technology is proposed to fulfill the high real-time requirement of the human-robot cooperation controller in this paper. An open source real-time kernel of Xenomai is employed as the real-time software platform of the robot control system. Based on this, four-layer interfaces architecture are accomplished, which are human-machine cooperation control layer, motion control layer, robot axis control layer and hardware abstraction layer, through the corresponding four real-time tasks to meet the demand of human-robot cooperation operations. In addition, the scheduling task is developed to manage the 4 real-time tasks. The dual buffer communication mechanisms and priority-based scheduling strategy between layers was exploited to synchronize these real-time tasks. The underlying hardware abstract interface and the human-robot collaborative control algorithm interface are opened in the control system as the quadric exploitation interfaces to meet the need of developing application tasks in real-time space. Experiment results which are conducted on a self-developed 6-DOF collaborative robot show that the proposed control system is effective in real-time control applications of human-robot cooperative control at the control cycle of 5 milliseconds.