Open system architecture modular tool kit for motion and machining processcontrol

A user-friendly reconfigurable and modular monitoring and control system fo r computerized numerical control (CNC) machine tool control and machining p rocess monitoring is described. The main part of the system is a fully inte grated combination of a real-time preemptive operating system (ORTS-DSP) fo r machine-level soft real-time tasks running on digital signal processor (D SP) boards and an enhanced Windows-NT-based environment (ORTS-PC/NT), runni ng on a PC, for applications such as high-level operator-machine interfaces and high-level communications with the ORTS-DSP tasks on the DSP boards. T he system has a vendor-neutral architecture, and supports multiple DSP boar ds and multiple PC host computers for distributed operation. A transparent communication protocol allows connection between software modules on the sa me or different DSP boards and the host Windows NT computers. The communica tion connections can be set up at runtime via a scripting language. ORTS al lows modular integration of new functions developed in the C language, and can be reconfigured to control robots, machine tools, or other processes, u sing simple script commands. The system can be used as an architecture modu lar operating system for the progressive development of real-time signal pr ocessing, motion, and process control applications. Sample applications for machine tool control and sensor-assisted machining applications are presen ted. An adjunct component of the above system is a module called the Intell igent Machining Module which is intended to provide an easy-to-use subsyste m for sensor-assisted machining, IMM is a fast, synchronous, runtime config urable signal processing network that can be reconfigured by means of plug- in software modules (PIMs) to form a sensor-based control or signal process ing system for applications that can take advantage of synchronous processi ng. Examples of existing PIMs are peak and average detectors, fast Fourier transforms, and control algorithms. IMM can be used as an integral part of the above system, or as a stand-alone subsystem, or integrated with semi-op en commercial CNC machines.