HighRobot: a high-performance universal robot control on parallel workstations

Abstract

This paper introduces a new type of parallel robot control based on standard hardware and software. HighRobot is a universal control for robot arms as well as peripheral devices. The control hardware is a multiprocessor SPARCstation running Solaris 2.x with soft real-time features compliant to POSIX.4. The software of the HighRobot control has an object-oriented design. Both hardware and software are structured in layers. The device control tasks are running in parallel on the workstation. The robot drives and peripheral devices are connected to HighRobot by the field-bus CAN.