BASIC DIGITAL MULTI-AXIS ROBOT CONTROL HAVING MODULAR PERFORMANCE EXPANSION CAPABILITY

A robot is provided with an arm having a plurality of motor driven joints. A power amplifier supplies drive current to each joint motor. Respective digital feedback control loop arrangements generate voltage commands from which signals are generated to operate the power amplifiers. Digital motor current, position and velocity feedback signals are generated for position, velocity and torque control loops in the digital feedback control loop arrangement. System resource facilities provide general support for the operation of the digital feedback control loops and include three separate communications controllers, a dual port microprocessor interfacing memory, a time stamp clock, a program memory and a nonvolatile data memory. A system level microprocessor based system or a microprocessor based position/velocity control system executes motion software from the program memory means according to whether the user desires an expanded performance robot control or a basic robot control. In the basic control, only the position/velocity microprocessor system is included and it is coupled to the system resource facilities. In the expanded control, both microprocessor systems are included and both are coupled to the system resource facilities.