Delta robot controlled by robotic operating system

Abstract

Parallel robots, which are faster and more robust than serial robots, use servomotors for movement generation on each of their joints, which are independently controlled. This control is usually addressed by wired connections, which increases the fail probability and has an effect on the actuation speed. In this work, we propose to implement a wireless control system for parallel robots, based on RS-232 interface. We used Robotic Operation System (ROS) for controlling the joint actuators, and a Python developed algorithm supported by OpenCV libraries. Experiments in a drawing application with bidimensional plots showed that the network implementation and the control algorithm provide us with increased robustness, response velocity and reliability (lower fail probability), thanks to the reduction of connection points.