Robot System and Programming Environment for Teaching Robotics

Abstract

Low cost, robot system for educational applications is described. After presenting kinematics, gripping and driving systems of the manipulator performance characteristics of the robot are given. The architecture of the distributed system for controlling manipulator and supporting trajectory or task planning activities is discussed. Original elements of the design are: coordinated digital group-control of stepping motors, specific system of control messages to be used within distributed control network and the multifunction gripper with automatically fed exchangeable tips. The ways our system may be used for supporting courses in robotics are considered. Then we describe a system based on personal computer which enables direct control and programming of the robot. By robot programming environment we understand devices (microcomputer and robot with the appropriate interfaces) together with an integrated software system. The role of that system is to create man-machine interface between robot and programer and to support robot-characteristic programming tasks such as creating trajectory, defining world model or writing a scenario. Prolog was chosen as implementation language. The system consists of the: man-machine-interface interpreter; trajectory editor; robot task programming language; robot-task database; Man-machine interface is through the screen, keyboard and mouse. The system is already implemented on IBM PC to control educational robot designed and built at the Institute of Control Engineering TU of Poznan.