RESEARCH AREAS

• Robot Control Systems
• PC Based Real-Time Systems for Controls, Robotics and Mechatronics
• Integration of Advanced Sensing and Vision Systems into Controls, Robotics and Mechatronics
• High-Speed Vision Systems for Fabric Handling

GENERAL PUBLICATIONS

RESEARCH PROJECTS

QMotor Robotic Toolkit

The QMotor Robotic Toolkit is set of libraries, programs, and utilities specifically targeted for robotic applications that utilize the QMotor control environment. The toolkit contains a GUI based teachpendant, a trajectory generator, and control programs for the Puma 560 and the Barrett Whole Arm Manipulator (WAM).
More information about the QMotor Robotic Toolkit

Conference Papers:
M. Loffler, D. Dawson, E. Zergeroglu, and N. Costescu, "Object-Oriented Techniques in Robot Manipulator Control Software Development", Proc. of the American Control Conference, Arlington, VA, June, 2001, pp. 4520-4525.

Journal Papers:
M. Loffler, D. Dawson, and N. Costescu, "QMotor 3.0 and QMotor Robotic Toolkit: A PC Based Control Platform", IEEE Control Systems Magazine, to appear.

(see copyright notice and the end of this page)

QRobot - A PC Based Robot Control System

QRobot is a PC-based system for telerobotic decontamination and decommissioning. The system integrates hardware interfacing, real-time joint level control, sensors, control of tools, networking and task level programming (ARCL) as well as operator interfaces using video and virtual reality. The system demonstrates that the PC, a cost effective and widely used platform, is well suited to the integration of real-time control tasks and advanced user interfaces. In the first stage of the project, the joint level control was implement on a QNX 4 PC and a network interface to the robot control library RCCL was developed. In the second stage, RCCL was replaced by ARCL, running on the same QNX 4 PC. QRobot is part of the Virtual Reality Based Telerobotic Decontamination and Decommissioning Project .
More information about QRobot .

QWidgets++ - A C++ Class Libary For The Photon microGUI

The Robotic Platform, QMotor, and QRobot require graphical user interfaces on the QNX operating systemm, using Photon, the QNX windows manager. Photon programming by using the Photon API is extensive and leads to long programs that are not easy to read. Using PhAB, the GUI builder for Photon simplifies the development but is limited: It is not possible to use object oriented programming techniques (e.g. to re-use GUI components), and it is not straightforward to dynamically create GUI components. To overcome these problems, QWidgets++ was developed.
More information about QWidgets++

The sUnwinding Analyzer

This project was a collasboration with the textile department. The Unwinding Analyzer is a PC-based measurement system for high-speed yarn unwinding. It measures the tension in the yarn and takes snapshots of the yarn path. The yarn path is then determined by image processing, and the yarn tension and the path can be compared with theoretical calculations.
More about nonlinear phenomena in high-speed yarn unwinding

Related Publications:
M. Löffler, "Measurement of the Three-dimensional Yarn Path and Tension in Yarn Unwinding", Diploma Thesis, Technische Universität München, September, 1996.