FPGA-based motion controller for wafer-handling robot

This study applies FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) technology to implement a motion controller for wafer-handling robot which has three-DOF (Degree of Freedom) motion. The proposed FPGA-based motion controller has two modules. The first module is Nios II processor which is used to realize the motion trajectory computation and the three-axis position/speed controllers. The second module is demonstrated to implement the three-axis current vector controllers by using FPGA hardware, and VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) is adopted to describe the controller behavior. Therefore, a fully digital motion controller for wafer-handling robot, such as one trajectory planning, three current vector controllers and three position/speed controllers are all implemented with an FPGA chip.