Open Architecture Control for CNC System – An Approach

The Open Architecture concept is gaining more attention because of growing demand from end users. Numerical Control systems are limited in terms of portability because they are dependent on vendor-specific environment, to overcome this limitation Open Architecture Control was introduced. Open Architecture improves portability, interoperability, scalability and ability to reconfigure of an existing CNC machine. Open control system increases the flexibility of CNC machine by allowing vendor-neutral environment. Open Architecture Controller allows the end user to modify the existing system by integrating components from different manufacturers which reduce cost as well as increase extendibility of the system. In this review paper, different initiatives and developments on Open Architecture Controller are presented. This paper also covers the approaches made by researchers in the field of simulation of table movement in CNC machine.

An Open STEP-NC Controller via LabVIEW Platform

In future technology in the field of advanced manufacturing, an open architecture controller in CNC system is studied. In this paper, the LabVIEW software platform is chosen and software realization methodology for the CNC system is determined for this application. This research project aims to meet the requirement of open architecture to create a CNC system based on new ISO standards of ISO 14649 and ISO 10303. As a result, open 3-Axis Mill CNC system based on component software reuse technology successfully developed. Two case studies of ISO 14649 (example 1 and example 2) were carried out through this developed system.

The Performance of a Delta Telerobot

The paper investigates the performance of a delta telerobot that a human operator works on a given task through the eye and hand of the robot. The Delta robot is installed with eye in hand camera and controlled by an open architecture controller that is configured to control the robot to follow the motion of the selectable HMI devices. The evaluation task is a three dimensional “connect the dot” game in which the robot is tele-operated with visual feedback to go point to point from position 1 to 6. The task performance is used to evaluate the performance of the total system that involves a robot, human factors, HMI, and environment. Three HMI devices including a manual pulse generator, Kinect camera, and a PHANToM OMNI Haptic Device are benchmarked. The result demonstrates that the Haptic with guided force is the best when compared to the others. In addition, the telerobot system can improve the time to completion by 30% and positioning accuracy by 50%, compared to human in the human scaled task. Then we investigate the effect of time delay of the delta telerobot with the Haptic. The result demonstrates that the time delay, that exceeds 100 ms, is proportion to both time to completion and positioning error in telerobot task, while the time delay below 100 ms gives no effect.

Implementing an Open-Architecture Controller for a Tension-Compression Fatigue Test Machine

In this research, an enhanced force control unit is proposed and implemented on a hydraulic tension-compression fatigue test machine. In this regard, different sensory data, such as force, hydraulic pressure, displacement and oil temperature is acquired and conditioned for controlling different subsystems of the machine. First, the transfer function of the system is identified. Then, a control strategy for applying cyclic force on the specimen with prescribed amplitude and frequency is proposed. The performance of the whole system is examined for the working range of the excitation frequency. In addition, the developed open-architecture controller can be used for testing the real parts found in various branches of industry. It can also be upgraded to be used on a universal fatigue test machine. It is shown that the designed controller can improve the performance of the machine significantly.