A novel real-time control system for plasma cutting robot with xPC target

Abstract

In this article, a novel inexpensive controller system for plasma cutting robots built based on MATLAB xPC is presented. The plasma cutting robot model with 5 degrees of freedom is constructed in the MATLAB/Simulink of the host machine, where the code is generated by real-time workshop and downloaded on the target machine. Two different types of proportional–integral–derivative controllers are applied on the experimental robot manipulator for the real-time plasma cutting process’s trajectory control using this hardware system. First, the performance of a standard proportional–integral–derivative controller is evaluated on this manipulator. Then, a novel proportional–integral–derivative controller structure is used to control the system, and it is compared with a standard proportional–integral–derivative controller. This study shows that the control system for a plasma cutting robot can be established inexpensively, and MATLAB xPC and different controllers can be applied on this system. Moreover, the study concludes that the novel proportional–integral–derivative controller used in this study gives better results for plasma cutting robots than the standard proportional–integral–derivative controller.