Retrofitting Path Control to a Unimate 2000B Robot

Abstract

A large hydraulic Unimate 2000B robot was donated to the University of Canterbury. The original control system was spread across 8 large circuit boards and provided point-to-point control. The new controller uses a single A5 size circuit board, an FPGA and a PC to provide full path control with a fully digital interface. Analog to digital or digital to analog conversions are avoided with the new controller and a very robust interface is obtained. The interface techniques and the software controller implementation are described along with some of the results obtained to date.