Reconfigurable wireless control system for a dual-arm cooperative robotic system

Dual-arm robots have large potentials in many fields, including automobile, aerospace, consumer electronics, and so on. However, the design of the coordinated controller is very challenging, since it is required to meet the real-time computation need of much more complex planning and control algorithm. Moreover, there exist a large number of cables for traditional design between the arms and the controller, resulting in inconveniences for installation, debugging, maintenance, updating, and so on. In this paper, we developed a reconfigurable wireless control system for a dual-arm cooperative robotic system to solve the above problems. It was designed as a distributed multi-layer system, consisting of a coordinated controller, two motion controllers corresponding to the two arms, and ZibBee wireless communication modules. The specific functions of each layer were defined. The processors of each layer are redundant and can be backed up for each other. The ZibBee modules establish the communication between the arm motion controller and the servo controllers of the joints. Furthermore, a human-machine interface, i.e. an interactive 3D graphic program OSG, was also developed. The virtual work environment together with the geometry model of a dual-arm robot was created by OSG in the PC. Finally, semi-physical simulations and prototype experiments were completed. Results show that the developed dual-arm cooperative control system has good stability and high reliability.