Robot Controller

机器人控制器Common

The control box paired with a robot arm, housing its motion-control computer, servo drives, and safety circuits.

In industrial robotics, the robot controller is usually a standalone control cabinet or box containing a motion-control computer, servo drivers for each joint, a power supply, safety circuits, and I/O ports, with an external teach pendant. It parses the robot's program, computes forward and inverse kinematics and trajectory interpolation, and hands each joint's target to its servo drive for closed-loop execution, while also handling safety functions like emergency stop, collision detection, and joint limits. Each of the “big four” industrial robot makers has its own controller; collaborative-robot makers build smaller control boxes, and some newer products integrate the drive directly into the joint (drive-integrated joints). In embodied AI research, a policy usually doesn't drive motors directly — it sends target poses or joint commands at high frequency through the controller's interface (such as UR's RTDE or Franka's libfranka), and the controller handles low-level tracking and safety.

ExampleRunning a VLA experiment on a UR collaborative arm, the policy on a workstation sends joint targets to the UR control box over the RTDE interface; the control box then drives the six joint motors and handles emergency stop and safety limits.

Also called: Control Cabinet, Control Box
Related: Teach Pendant · Industrial Robot · Servo Motor · Integrated Drive and Control · RTDE · libfranka / Franka Control Interface (FCI)
Sources: Industrial robot - Wikipedia