An independently working computer peripheral generating robot arm trajectories

Abstract

An application specific peripheral processor is described, which independently carries out the task of generating the path for the desired motion of a manipulator. The trajectories are planned by the central computer in form of low order polynomial spline functions, whose parameters are then transferred to the peripheral. Here, the position, velocity, and acceleration values are constantly computed to be fed into the manipulator's control system. The algorithms employed by the peripheral and detailed below exploit various intrinsic properties of polynomials to minimise the arithmetic complexity. This distributed logic approach unburdens the central processor and utilises application specific inherent parallelism. Although a system's internal data transmission expense is drastically reduced, the concept allows much higher path update rates. The functional unit can be frequently applied and is thus easily standardisable.