With the rapid development of the processing industry in China, the level of automation equipment in various industries is becoming higher and higher. Modern processing workshops are often equipped with robotic arms to improve production efficiency and replace workers in completing dangerous and heavy labor in harsh environments.
At present, robots are commonly used to complete tasks such as: in the injection molding industry, they are used to quickly grab products from molds and transport them to the next production process; Used for material retrieval and feeding in the mechanical processing industry; Used in the casting industry to extract high-temperature molten liquid, and so on. This article takes the handling manipulator that can achieve this type of work as the research object, and introduces and analyzes the software and hardware of the control system of the Cartesian coordinate manipulator for industrial material retrieval that the author participated in.
At present, the common control method for the main motion arm of industrial rectangular coordinate manipulator in the market mainly adopts hydraulic or pneumatic drive. The advantage of this control strategy is its simple structure and easy control of the system. But the disadvantage is that the system positioning is achieved by setting the position of the proximity switch, which has low positioning accuracy. However, once the user requests to change the type of material retrieval work, the positioning switches of each hydraulic or pneumatic cylinder must be readjusted to adapt to new work tasks, which is not conducive to the automation of the production process.
The author of this article participated in the design of a Cartesian coordinate manipulator for industrial material retrieval. The main motion is controlled by a fully electric control method. The system is driven by an AC motor, with a dedicated AC motor servo controller as the lower computer and an industrial control computer as the upper computer. The overall system adopts a distributed control strategy. This design scheme has high control accuracy, high real-time control performance, compact structure, and is easy for users to operate.
System structure
The working mode of industrial material retrieval robotic arm is completed according to the concept of "teaching/reproducing robot", which means that a person uses a teaching device to teach the working behavior of the robotic arm. During the teaching process, the starting point positions of each motion joint of the robotic arm are recorded, and this action process is repeated according to the user's set motion speed and acceleration during the production process.
Based on the above analysis, we have designed a type of industrial reclaiming manipulator with a fully electric main motion. The robotic arm control system adopts a distributed control structure, where one upper computer controls five lower servo controllers. Each lower servo controller drives a separate AC asynchronous motor, which drives the actuator of the robotic arm to complete the action.
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