Multi-axis motion controller for robotic applications implemented on an FPGA

This paper presents the design of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based motion controller for robotic applications. In contrast to digital signal processor and microprocessor implementations, the control period of this system is fixed. Foregoing implementations on FPGA require microprocessor-based platforms for data interchange tasks consuming a large amount of resources; consequently, they could not be implemented on low logic density devices, or they use IP cores which limits the implementation of the system to only certain device families. This new motion controller architecture integrates control and communication modules in a single chip which permits an increase to the number of axis according to the system requirements. The proposed design presents a low consumption of logic resources; therefore, a considerable cost saving per axis is achieved. The system test has been carried out with a three-degree of freedom selective compliant assembly robot arm robot and a standard PC as master device. The digital filter parameters have been tuned by using a crossover frequency method. Step and profiled motion responses obtained show very good performance.