Abstract

    In robotics, the force feedback control is more and more used, to control assembling, polishing or rubbing down processes. Measuring the actions applied by the tool on the external environment is often a means to increase the finished product quality and the productive capacity, but also to securitize the equipment by limiting overloads.

    The work we did for Dr. Harvey Lipkin’s laboratory at Georgia Tech consisted of interfacing a six degrees of freedom force/torque sensor on the end-of-arm of an UNIMATE PUMA 500 robot.

    For that, we used a Personal Computer external to the robot controller in which we installed the control board of the sensor. All the force/torque information, but also the settings of the sensor are retrieved under Microsoft Visual J++, a JAVA language-developing environment. This J++ program permits to treat the data coming from the sensor and to interpret them, to send the appropriated motion instructions to the robot controller, via a serial link. These instructions are received by the computer controller of the robot, which interprets them by modifying the robot arm movements, using real time path control.

    The choice to use JAVA language for this project permitted us to evaluate the difficulties to adapt two computing components from different generations (Puma robot, designed during the 80’s, and JAVA, which for us represents the new programming languages reference).