OpenController

Industrial Robots are complex systems with hard real time, high rel iability,availability and safety requirements. Robot Controllers are part of thesesystems and they are complex real time computers, which control a robot’s mechanicalarms. By their nature, Robot Controllers are generic and open computersystems, because to be useful, they must be programmable by end customers.This is typically done through software configuration parameters and adomain and vendor specific programming languages. For some purposes, thismay not be sufficient. A way to add low- level software extensions to the system,basically extending the platform itself is needed, when for example a thirdparty wants add a completely new sensor type that is not supported by the platform.The architecture evolution in this direction brings a whole new set ofbroad quality issues and other concerns.