In recent years the need for advanced robot control algorithms for industrial robots has
grown. The deyelopment of a low-cost robot controller to support the development, implementation
and testing of those algorithms which require high computational power
was targeted. This paper deals wiith the requirements of an experimental controller that
can be connected to a NOKIA PUMA 560 robot arm. It explains the IBM PC compatible
host and the TEXAS Digital Signal Processor (DSP) based hardware. On the host
computer the UNIX-like QXX real-time operating system is used. In the current phase of
development the robot controller works with the classical decentralised joint control based
strategy. The Advanced Robot Pogramming System (ARPS) explicit robot programming,
language is implementedl