Interfacing Computing Platforms for Dynamic Control and Identification of an Industrial KUKA Robot Arm

The KUKA Agilus industrial robot arm is a relatively small robot suitable for industrial automation applications requiring a fast light-weight robot. This robot is popular with university research laboratories and educational settings. Several tools for interfacing personal computers and software packages with the robot controller are shared amongst researchers and developers. This paper presents a user interface that was developed as an interface platform between the KUKA Agilus industrial robot arm and personal computers. The developed program is dubbed, the GJU-KUKA Tool Kit, and includes two tools. The first tool uses the JOpenShowVar toolkit to dynamically collect the logging data from the robots six joints to the personal computer, enabling the analysis of robot motion dynamics and real-time control. The second tool uses OpenCV library to draw image files uploaded on the personal computer. The functionality of these tools are described in this paper along with a discussion of sample output and potential research applications.