Hi,
I was given a project to work on PUMA560 using QNX. can anyone help me how can I make this puma to work real time. What equipment was needed to work on this? I currently have TRC205 robot amplifier module, ISA servo I/O card, and PUMA500, QNX6.3 OS with me. What more equipment/software is needed to work on this? If anyone worked on PUMA using QNX please suggest me as Iam totally new to this robotics. Thanks.
Trivikram
Hello,
I haven’t made the PUMA560 actually work with QNX, but I know that there is a research lab called “Advanced Robotics Facility” at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh / Scotland. I worked there and wrote drivers to control a Mitsubishi PA-10 manipulator under QNX 6.2.1.
A PUMA560 was standing there, waiting to be connected. No idea if this happened in the meantime. The concept was to use a general-purpose Analog & Digital I/O Board (Model MultiQ-3 by Quanser) and build an intermediate adapter PCB to connect the PUMA control unit. The reason was, according to the director of the lab, that no I/O cards to be plugged into a PC are available for this robot. You say you have a complete hardware connection already? I suggest you read the documentation of that ISA board and write a resource manager that makes its functionality available to your control application, may be with a separate layer that converts between your control application (sending torques) and the commands that your card understands.
I can also send you some papers about the lab if you are interested.
Hope that helps
Albrecht