Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Monday 13 March 2006 06:09, David McMillan wrote:
Kevanf1 wrote:
... Kawasaki started out by making agricultural equipment... some may argue that they still do ;-)
They make a fairly decent industrial robot, as long as you don't want it to do anything terribly fancy. Has a nice, gentle learning curve. However, you can't run Linux on it. :(
That sounds like a challenge...
Heh. It's a almost-completely proprietary firmware-based system, although supposedly the newer generations are actually running some kind of Windows-based system. I suppose it might be *possible,* but it's awfully expensive equipment to buy just to hack Linux onto it. Now, if you want a good industrial robot that's also a good Linux candidate, use a recent-generation Kuka (disclaimer -- I do work for the company). The KRC1 and KRC2 controllers are not only based almost entirely on standard PC architecture, they actually run VxWorks as their RTOS (and also run a version of Windows in parallel, using a split-memory architecture, for the user interface). The design is also heavily modularized, using mostly off-the-shelf components, so it's about the most potentially hackable of the major industrial robots, IMO. The really sticky points would be the very low-level interactions with the one purely-proprietary piece of hardware, the special interface card that executes most of the kinematics and hardware-based-RT functions in dedicated firmware. But, if OROCOS lives up to its promise, it might well be possible to bypass that card entirely and execute the system in an open-source environment. Be a heck of an undertaking, though....