Facilities

The Center for Robotics and Automation at Washington University has been established with the objective of carrying out sponsored research by faculty members and graduate students in the fields of intelligent robotic workstation modeling, controller and action planner design, software development and other related topics.

The Center is currently equipped with two PUMA 560 arms, each of which is controlled by an Universal Motor Controller (UMC). The controllers are state-of-the-art, and are being successfully used at the Center. The UMC is the best system available today and will continue to be the best for several years. They provide a phenomenal 1000 Hertz servo rate for control (without interpolation).

The Center recently revamped its computing and control facilities. A Silicon Graphics SGI 4D/340 VGX graphics workstation has been donated to the center, through a hundred thousand dollar gift from a private source, and is now the high level command and computing resource. The recently acquired force/torque sensors are well integrated into the UMC architecture. An Intelledex 386 computer vision system, using two black and white CCD cameras, is in the process of being integrated into the system. The Silicon Graphics SGI 4D/340 VGX machine has four RISC processors with a fully symmetric architecture. An independent geometry engine delivers superb graphics performance. The hardware, together with well-adapted software, facilitates high speed floating point operations and real-time graphics. The processing unit can deliver up to 117 MIPS or 36 MFLOPS. The interfacing capability of this machine enables a fast and reliable information interchange between the various sensing devices and the controllers. Therefore, at a high level, the machine has access to all sensory information. Thus, the lab has a distributed computing and control architecture capable of real-time, sensor-referenced, dual-arm coordinated dynamic control, at a very high servo rate of 1000 Hertz (without interpolation) per joint per robot. Typically, with a 1000 Hertz task space servo rate on two six DOF PUMA 560 manipulators, only 50\% of the computing power of the machine is used. The graphical capabilities are further enhanced by various graphical input devices: mouse, spaceball, and dials and buttons.