Open Modular Robot Control Architecture for Assembly Using the Task Frame Formalism

The task frame formalism allows the programmer to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional robot oriented assembly programming, moving the programmer’s focus on the robot task. Additionally skill primitives contribute to a more natural programming paradigm. In this paper a robot control architecture is presented that implements both of these concepts providing a framework to easily implement new control features. Focus is put on a novel modular trajectory generator and the applied three-layered scheduling design. This architecture is based on the communication middleware MIRPA-X and has been experimentally validated on the HEXA parallel manipulator. The future use of distributed computing and runtime scheduling optimization are discussed.