Design of the IRIS facility-a modular, reconfigurable and expandable robot test bed

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThe IRIS Facility is a modular, reconfigurable and expandable robot system to be used for experiments in grasping, manipulation and force control. The baseline layout of the Facility will have two manipulators with four rotary joints each. Each manipulator can be easily disassembled and reassembled to assume a multitude of configurations. Each joint is driven by d.c. brushless motors coupled with harmonic cup drives and instrumented with position, and torque sensors. A six d.0.J forcdtorque sensor is mounted at the tip link. Additional manipulators with different joint layouts will be added in the future.The real-time controller of the IRIS Faciliry has also been designed to be modular and expandable. It is based on a nodal architecture with a PC-486 host and an AMD29050 co-processor as the CPU of each secondary node. Each node is capable of controlling 8 joints at I kHz while executing over lo00 FP (Floating Point) operations per joint in each sampling interval. This paper describes the design of the IRIS Facility and its functional capabilities. I n addition, the rationale behind the major design decisions is given.

Kinematic Design of Serial Link Manipulators From Task Specifications

“…This drawback can be overcome by a modular and structured design philosophy, as is advocated in (Schmitz, Khosla, and Kanade 1988;Fukuda et al 1992;Sreevijayan 1992;Hui et al 1993;Chen and Burdick 1995). Modularity in hardware and software has the advantage of facilitating testing during the design phase and therefore reducing the chances for unanticipated faults.…”

Hardware Flexibility of Laboratory Automation Systems: Analysis and New Flexible Automation Architectures

“…Fig. 5 shows an example of a modular robotic arm in an engineering research laboratory [21]. Design and control of modular arms have been extensively studied in the last decade [19,22,23] and most of the difficulties pertaining to the implementation (design and control) of modular arms have been addressed and they are currently used in manufacturing industry and R&D engineering research laboratories.…”

Automatic centralized controller design for modular and reconfigurable robot manipulators

“…In the last three decades several modular robot manipulators have been developed, for instance the RMMS [1], TOMMS [2], IRIS [3], PolyBot [4] and a spring assisted reconfigurable modular robot [5]. The high versatility of the modular and reconfigurable robot manipulators leads to several challenges, especially for the design of the control system.…”