Robot arm controller using FPGA

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to design and build a control system with an FPGA chip to control the movements of a robotic arm. The whole system is composed of the Controller System and the drive circuits, one driver circuit for each motor on the robotic arm. These drive circuits are needed because the Control System does not supply enough power to drive the motors directly. The controller System is implemented on the Spartan -II FPGA chip using VHDL code. Spartan -II FPGA is capable of running at much higher speed but a slow clock is needed to obtain relatively large delays for the output signals. This paper basically focus on the work of our project which is based on motion control using stepper motor .we have successfully done the basic part of project in which we control the stepper motor using FPGA. We have successfully done the programming and simulation part of the project. We enjoyed the PCB designing, soldering and troubleshooting of PCB. This project gives the idea regarding controlling servo and stepper motor using interfacing of ULN2803A with FPGA. Consequently, it's important to understand how to work, and what problems exist in designing effective robots. This project will address one of those problems: positional control.