Development of Chip-based Precision Motion Controller

  • Cho, Jung-Uk (School of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University) ;
  • Jeon, Jae-Wook (School of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University)
  • Published : 2003.10.22

Abstract

The Motion controllers provide the sophisticated performance and enhanced capabilities we can see in the movements of robotic systems. Several types of motion controllers are available, some based on the kind of overall control system in use. PLC (Programmable Logic Controller)-based motion controllers still predominate. The many peoples use MCU (Micro Controller Unit)-based board level motion controllers and will continue to in the near-term future. These motion controllers control a variety motor system like robotic systems. Generally, They consist of large and complex circuits. PLC-based motion controller consists of high performance PLC, development tool, and application specific software. It can be cause to generate several problems that are large size and space, much cabling, and additional high coasts. MCU-based motion controller consists of memories like ROM and RAM, I/O interface ports, and decoder in order to operate MCU. Additionally, it needs DPRAM to communicate with host PC, counter to get position information of motor by using encoder signal, additional circuits to control servo, and application specific software to generate a various velocity profiles. It can be causes to generate several problems that are overall system complexity, large size and space, much cabling, large power consumption and additional high costs. Also, it needs much times to calculate velocity profile because of generating by software method and don't generate various velocity profiles like arbitrary velocity profile. Therefore, It is hard to generate expected various velocity profiles. And further, to embed real-time OS (Operating System) is considered for more reliable motion control. In this paper, the structure of chip-based precision motion controller is proposed to solve above-mentioned problems of control systems. This proposed motion controller is designed with a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) by using the VHDL (Very high speed integrated circuit Hardware Description Language) and Handel-C that is program language for deign hardware. This motion controller consists of Velocity Profile Generator (VPG) part to generate expected various velocity profiles, PCI Interface part to communicate with host PC, Feedback Counter part to get position information by using encoder signal, Clock Generator to generate expected various clock signal, Controller part to control position of motor with generated velocity profile and position information, and Data Converter part to convert and transmit compatible data to D/A converter.

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