An open architecture manufacturing system pursues to integrate manufacturing components on a single platform. Therefore, a particular component can be easily added and/or replaced. In this paper, a modular and object-oriented approach for the PC-based open robot control (PC-ORC) system is investigated. A standard reference model for controlling robots, which consists of a hardware platform, an operating system module, and various application software modules, is first proposed. Then, PC-ORC system, which can reconfigure the control system in various production environments, is developed. The PC-ORC is constructed based upon the object-oriented method. Hence, it allows an easy implementation and modification of various modules. The PC-ORC consists of basic software, application objects, and additional hardware devices on a PC platform. Finally, by applying the proposed PC-ORC to a SCARA robot, the performance of the PC-ORC is examined. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
