Software design of the hybrid robot machine for ITER vacuum vessel assembly and maintenance

A specific software design is elaborated in this paper for the hybrid robot machine used for the ITER vacuum vessel (VV) assembly and maintenance. In order to provide the multi-machining-function as well as the complicated, flexible and customizable GUI designing satisfying the non-standardized VV assembly process in one hand, and in another hand guarantee the stringent machining precision in the real-time motion control of robot machine, a client-server-control software architecture is proposed, which separates the user interaction, data communication and robot control implementation into different software layers. Correspondingly, three particular application protocols upon the TCP/IP are designed to transmit the data, command and statu between the client and the server so as to deal with the abundant data streaming in the software: In order not to be affected by the graphic user interface (GUI) modification process in the future experiment in VV assembly working field, the real-time control system is realized as a stand-alone module in the architecture to guarantee the controlling performance of the robot machine. After completing the software development, a milling operation is tested on the robot machine, and the result demonstrates that both the specific GUI operability and the real-time motion control performance could be guaranteed adequately in the software design. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.