Real-time FPGA control of a hexapod robot for 6-DOF biomechanical testing
Date
2011
Authors
Ding, B.
Stanley, R.
Cazzolato, B.
Costi, J.
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Conference paper
Citation
Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, held in Melbourne, 7-10 November, 2011: pp.252-257
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Boyin Ding, Richard M. Stanley, Benjamin S. Cazzolato and John J. Costi
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Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (37th : 2011 : Melbourne)
Abstract
A hexapod robotic test system has been developed to enable complex six degree of freedom (6-DOF) testing of bones, joints, soft tissues, artificial joints and other medical and surgical devices. The device employs six permanent-magnet servomotor driven ballscrews to actuate the system, and measures the displacement response using incremental encoders and loads using a six axis load-cell. The mechanism incorporates a unique design which mitigates many of the issues arising from load-cell compliance, common to most other serial and parallel mechanisms for material testing. This was achieved through a non-collocated design which raises additional challenges. Achieving high bandwidth control of the hexapod also presents challenges, and was achieved using a combination of LabVIEW real-time running on a floating-point Intel processor, along with LabVIEW FPGA running on 16bit Xilinx FPGAs. In this paper the following unique aspects of this hexapod are discussed: the mitigation of load-cell compliance, non-collocated control, implementation of the controller on a real-time platform, and finally technical solutions to solve the complex forward-kinematics solution in real-time. Finally, the results from testing a high-density polymer cylindrical specimen are presented.
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© 2011 IEEE