The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jun. 04, 1996
Filed:
May. 02, 1994
Andrew A Goldenberg, Toronto, CA;
Nenad M Kircanski, North York, CA;
Pawel Kuzan, Oakville, CA;
Jacek A Wiercienski, Oakville, CA;
Raymond Hui, Montreal, CA;
Chin Zhou, Toronto, CA;
Engineering Services, Inc., Ontario, CA;
Abstract
The subject invention provides a modular, expandable and reconfigurable robotic system. In one aspect of the invention there is provided a robot having at least two manipulators each having several compact rotary joints. The rotary joints have one input coupling and either one or two output couplings. Each joint is modular including a d.c. brushless motor coupled with a harmonic cup drive and includes position, velocity and torque sensors. Each manipulator may be disassembled and reassembled to assume a multitude of configurations. In another aspect of the invention there is provided an expandable and modular real-time computer control system for controlling the robot. The computer architecture achieves between 5 to 10 MFLOPS with reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processor nodes and a fast point-to-point communication network. Each node includes a host computer and parallel input/output (I/O) modules as well. The nodes are controlled by nearly zero-overhead real-time operating system (OS) kernels responsible for task scheduling, communication and user-interface. Each node is capable of controlling 8 joints at 1 kHz while executing over 1000 floating point operations per joint in each sampling interval.