Operation, Programming and Control of Industrial Robots

An industrial robot, unlike a telemanipulator, is driven through a sequence of movements by a program of some kind. The program is executed by a controller; the basic relationship between the controller and the robot is shown in Figure 3.1. The controller turns on the joint actuators (throughout this chapter the terms ‘joint’ and ‘axis’ are used interchangeably) at the appropriate times, while signals from the joint sensors are returned to the controller and used for feedback. The types of controller, methods of programming and details of joint servo control are discussed in the following sections. We begin with the classification of industrial robots.