Bachelor's Thesis

I remember that before starting my work on the Bachelor’s Thesis I was usnure of focusing my career on robotics although it was something that really interted me before. Due to my interest in the course on Advanced Computer Control I asked the profesor if they were proposing any Thesis related to this in any laboratory. I was lucky enough that it was the case and this is where I started working on parallel robots for rehabilitation purposes with Marina Vallés.

The purpose of this Bachelor’s Thesis was to implement a control architecture for 4DOF parallel robots through a real time embedded industrial controller and an FPGA. This controller was the Compact-RIO from National Instrument whose CPU and FPGA were programmable by the language LAB-VIEW.

I loved solving all sort of problems related to a distributed real time control architecture, such as:

• Implementing a buffer in the Compact Rio to store trajectory points that were sent form the host and do not lose them.
• Measuring the latency in the communication between the Compact Rio and the host.
• Measuing important variables in the control loop like: position error, control action, proportional action, derivative action, gravity compensation action, etc.
• Implementing a controller that was not only based on a PID, but also was able to compensate gravity.
• Creating an abstract enough interface to be able to test the software and hardware on simulation (MATLAB / Simulink) as if it was the real robot.

One of the advantages of using LabView is that it is very easy to create a Graphical User Interface to control the robot and also to visualize important variables in the system. This was the result:

Programming in LabView works different than a standard programming language. It basically consists of connecting blocks (functions) through wires. It was a valuable experience, but I personally prefer standard programming languages.