In recent years the need for advanced robot control algorithms for industrial robots
has grown. The development of a low-cost robot controller to support the development,
implementation and testing of those algorithms which require high computational power
was targeted. This paper deals with the requirements of an experimental controller
that can be connected to a NOKIA-PUMA 560 robot arm. It explains the IBM PC compatible
host and the TEXAS Digital Signal Processor (DSP) based hardware. On the host computer
the UNIX-like QNX real-time operating system is used. In the current phase of development
the robot controller works with the classical decentralised joint control based strategy.
The Advanced Robot Programming System (ARPS) explicit robot programming language is
implemented.
