The development of six D.O.F. robot arm for intelligent robot

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to develop a six D.O.F robot arm for an intelligent robot. As for the shoulder part, the harmonic drive, which has some advantages (such as zero backlash, small volume, and high reduction ratio), was used to ensure the weight of the whole arm could be supported. The kinematic equations of the robot arm have been verified in this paper. As for the links of a robot arm, the Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) coordinate transformation method is generally used. The six axes data of the robot arm can be obtained from the Inverse Kinematics analysis. Through the Simulink function of Matlab software, we can make the forward or inverse kinematics computation of the robot arm. In the control aspect, the PC based controller and the DSP based 8 axis motion control card were used to control the robot arm. When the robot arm hardware was finished, the PID control parameters of the servo motors should be adjusted first. Finally, we make some experiments; the PC based controller can control the robot arm to grab a box through a moving path successfully.