A novel real-time control system for plasma cutting robot with xPC target

Abstract

In this article, a novel inexpensive controller system for plasma cutting robots built based on MATLAB xPC is presented. The plasma cutting robot model with 5 degrees of freedom is constructed in the MATLAB/Simulink of the host machine, where the code is generated by real-time workshop and downloaded on the target machine. Two different types of proportional-integral-derivative controllers are applied on the experimental robot manipulator for the real-time plasma cutting process's trajectory control using this hardware system. First, the performance of a standard proportional-integral-derivative controller is evaluated on this manipulator. Then, a novel proportional-integral-derivative controller structure is used to control the system, and it is compared with a standard proportional-integral-derivative controller. This study shows that the control system for a plasma cutting robot can be established inexpensively, and MATLAB xPC and different controllers can be applied on this system. Moreover, the study concludes that the novel proportional-integral-derivative controller used in this study gives better results for plasma cutting robots than the standard proportional-integral-derivative controller.