Robot manipulator control via CNC software?

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Hey Everyone,

I've been trying to repair a 3dodf industrial robot that I rescued from a rubbish pile a few years back. Here are some pictures of it:

First Images of Dada – dada

The robot uses stepper motors and I managed to find some suitable stepper drivers (Motion Control's MSD542), which I was attempting to control from an Arduino. This drove the steppers fine, but I had a hell of the time trying to get a straight line out of my custom written software. So, now I'm wondering if I may be able to use some CNC software to do this job instead?

The main issue here is that there is a rotary joint at the base of the robot and then two linear joints, rather than the 3 linear joints on a typical CNC, so I'd have to factor in the robot kinematics somewhere if I wanted 3D control. Otherwise I could probably achieve 2D control in the X/Z plane by just ignoring the rotary joint, though this isn't idea.

Also, I'd like to have semi-real time control over the robot, so that I could send it new trajectories from a computer without relying on pre-defined trajectories based on SD-cards and pre-defined paths sequences.

Btw, the main objective of this robot will be drawing and pick and place.

Any advice / suggestions / useful links appreciated. After a few years of being too busy, I'm dying to get this guy up and running, but am not that keen on figuring out stepper trajectories if there is a nice bit of software that will do it for me.

Many Thanks,

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[Quebecois_Sti]

Maybe a software like RobotMaster could help ? You will have to modify it because Robotmaster is for Fanuc robot.

There is one robot simulator with ABB too, RobotStudio.

Maybe there is a simulator who can be modified to work with any brand...?