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A Robotic Application
M. Gerke R. Dicken H. Hoyer
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0-8186-5292-6/94 $3.00@ 1994 IEEE
2 Stepping into Virtual Reality manently established via its eerial ALTERinterfacee.
Due to the fact that online motion control is highly cri-
Improving a simulation system for kinematic com- tical in time (controller cycle time: 28 me), a simple
ponents by modern man-machine-interftxes and estab- communication protocol with fault detection is used.
lihing a realtime communication to the technical pn>- MARK 111-Controllers offer the actual poeition data
cess leads to a VRsyetem of industrial relevance. set of the robote Tool Center Pointe (TCP) and are
In robotica the efficiency of a VRsystem depends ready to receive correctional data from the communi-
on the availsbity of communication interfaces bet- cation manager. Another serial communication link
ween different hardware and software components. To interconnects the manager and the grafical worksta-
build up a VRsystem today means you still have to tion.
chooee standard system componenb such aa the robot If the system is working (YI ’Visualisation Tool’ the
controller hardware and simulation software carefully simulation system orders the data seta of the actual
whereas future components are expected to be opened positions of the robob from the communication ma-
for user purpoeee. nager by hardware interrupt.
The immediate availability of our VR-system for ex- In ’Control Mode’for teleoperation a robot command
ample is guaranteed by choosing the following hard- teach ball is connected to the communication mana-
ware configuration: ger as system sensor input. The teach ball transforms
UNIMATION PUMA 562 industrial robots with human force/momentum data to digital data thus nx+
MARK 111-controller (Operation System VAL 11) are ving the robots T.C.Pa directly in i b Cartesian m r -
built up in a practical workcell. T h e standard robots dinate frame.
offer a serial ALTER-interface for onlinemotion con- Beyond all theee communication links easential to re%
trol by external computers. The robots are integrated l i e a ‘Virtual Reality‘ environment, there is an*
into Ethernet via their serial SUPERVISOR-interfacea ther serial data link necessary between MARK III-
and a network front-end computer. controller and any network computer supporting
The simulation software runs on a high perfor- DDCMP-profocoll (e.g. DEC-VAX) via the control-
mance grafical workstation HP-WS 30-625 under DO- lers SUPERVISOR-Interfaceto include P r o g r v m h g
MAIN/OS 10.3. The workstation is included into Tool features to the system. Path planning has to be.
Ethernet and offers serial data links. done carefully offline with the simulation system and
Serial communication management is done on an in- afterwards motion instructions (programme, locations,
dustrial Personal Computer 80386 (under MSDOS) variables) are downloaded fiom the grafical worksta-
with four data interfaces. tion via network towards the front-cnd computer and
To provide comfortable manipulator motion control, via serial data link to the robot motion controllers.
a robot command teach ball serves as man-machine- A communication software is developed for the Com-
interface. The ‘Virtual Reality‘-system hardware plat- munication Manager to assure that data transport and
form consists exclusively of commercial equipement administration for MARK 111-controller, robot com-
without any hardware modification. The configura- mand teach ball and grafical worlretation is correct
tion is presented in figure 1. No changes are necessary according to the subsystems specifications (protocol,
with regard to the robot controller. The simulation data format). Special action has to be performed on
software S.M.S.version 3.0 (SIEMENS) provides gra- hardwareinterrupt to provide position data on request
fical visualization and motion animation of mechanical from the simulation software [DI 931. Due to the time
systems. P L O 911. critical data interchange between communication ma-
nager and robot controller, position data sets and -in
This ’VR’-system is a comfortable tool for high level return- correctional data have to be transmitted and
control of robotic applications. A typical example is computed within 15 me; otherwise a ‘communication
given in figure 2. error‘ is stated by the robot controller. In addition
to all the communication tasks the Communication
Manager has to administer data which includes data
3 Managing communication transformation and allocation.
The simulation system S.M.S.3.0 is particially modi-
The communication manager (PC 80386) uses se- fied to our needs; beyond its standard volume S I E
rial interfaces (RS232, Rs 422) to administer and su- MENS opened a eoftware-interface for us which is ex-
pervise the easential communications. The communi- tensively wed for our ‘VR‘-reslition. Communi*
cation link to PUMA 562 MARK 111-controllersis per-
352
A
PUMA 682
MARK 111
I IV -
Teach Bell
DIMENSION 6
m
-
ch Ball
DIMENSION 6
\\ Industrial PC
~~~~~~
353
tion software had to be integrated to handle interrupt This product can be replaced by any other robotic
request and data interchange with the Communica- simulation system if a user programmable software in-
tion Manager. Some subroutines neeeosary in robotic terface is provided by the developer. The following
applications such as backtransformation of 'homogene functionality is necessary: Receiving positional data
coordinates' [PAUL 811 had to be implemented. on q u e s t via eerial data link, data transformation
for visualization. A data base for standard industrial
The VRsystem will be improved within short terms robots should be included.
by integration of an image processing system to reco- Modern controllers for industrial robots (e.g. UNI-
g n k error conditions occuring in the factory workcell MATION PUMA, ADEPT) offer hardware interfaces
and to handle dangerous motion commands from the for realtime path control; so no changea in robot con-
operator. With regard to industrial standards a VME- troller hardware or software are necessary.
computer under OS9 is to be integrated aa communi-
cation manager.
6 Acknowledgement
4 Examples S.M.S.3.0 has been provided by SIEMENS AG Er-
langen; special thanks Dipl.Ing. P. Kolbenschlag of
To demonstrate the functionality of our 'VR'- SIEMENS, who adopted a softwareinterface acwr-
concept preaented above two typical tasks of teleope- ding to our common definition.
ration have been carried out:
The simulation system is initialized by loading a simu-
lation environment according to the actual workcell. A References
PUMA 562 in our real workcell moves into a predefined
start position and initiates ALTERMode. The simu- [GER 911 Gerke M.,Borgolte U., Hoyer H., Roboter-
lation environment is referenced via data communiccl-
simulation ala kombiniertea Entwurfa- und Pro-
tion presenting a PUMA 562 in start position. Now grammierwerkseug, Simulationstechnik, ?. Sym-
manual input from sensor teachball leads to the robots posium, Hagen 1991 (in German)
Cartesian motion directing the robots T.C.P. to any
goal position. Within each controller cycle (28 ma), [HOY 931 Hoyer H., Gerke M.,Virtual Reality fuer
the robot sends positional data to the Communication Roboter im industriellen Einsate, Simulations-
Manager to permanently hold available the actual p e technik, 8. S y m p i u m , Berlin 1993 (in German)
sition data set for any request from the simulation
environment. So visualisation of the robot motion is [WLO 911 Wloka D.W. (Hrsg.), Robotersimulation,
kept online. The robots corresponding motion trajec- Springer-Verlag 1991 (in German)
tory can be protocolled grafically in a TRACE-mode. [DI 931 Dicken R., Implementierung eines Virtual
Two screen copies of teleoperation tasks are preaented Reality Konzeptes, FernUniversitat Hagen, Di-
in figure 3 and 4. ploma Thesis 1993 (in German)
[PAUL 811 Paul R.P., Kinematic Control Equations
5 Software Availability for Simple Manipulators, IEEESMC-11, No.6
Source code software and documentation for the
Communication Manager is written in C (MS-DOS)
and useful for PC 80x86's Serial Duart 8250; im-
plementation on 680x0's Serial Duart 68681 is cur-
rently under developement in C (OS-9). This
software is available for free; send email to
'michael.gerke@fernuni-hagen.de'.
S.M.S.is a product of SIEMENS A.G.(Dep. ZPL-PA)
in Erlangen, Germany; currently it is available for HP-
APOLLO workstationsunder DOMAIN-OS and it has
to be purchased. Software menus are in German lan-
guage.
354
Figure 3: Teleoperation: Dominant t r d a t i o n a i components of motion
II - I
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