IKArm

Welcome to the RoboJackets Inverse Kinematic Arm wiki!

Description

The Inverse Kinematic Arm project is an independent research endeavor that isn't affiliated with a robotics competition. The goal of the project is to explore control algorithms for implementing inverse kinematic control. This form of control is where the position of the end of the manipulator is controlled directly by giving it coordinates in 3 dimensional space to move to. The control algorithm is designed to determine what motions all the joints of the arm need to perform in order to achieve the desired end effector position.

The project will be conducted using a 3 degree of freedom arm that was taken off of an old bomb disposal robot(bombbot) that was donated to the RoboJackets by Dr. Wayne Book. Each joint is controlled independently by Vantec Motor drivers taken from the bombbot. Also, each joint has a potentiometer connected to it for positional sensing. All of the motor drivers and potentiometers are connected to an Atmel AVR development board which serves as an RS-232 adapter for the robot. Currently, the AVR board will connect to the serial port of a computer, which will control the robot using Labview.

Initially the goal will be to implement forward kinematic control of the robot, which entails independent PID control of each joint and determining the position of the end effector. Then several different inverse kinematic control algorithms including:

• Velocity controlled IK
• Path Controlled IK

The last goal of the project will be to implement hybrid control of the arm position in order to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously.

Announcements

• 9/28/06 - Current progress for this week has been updated here.
• 9/26/06 - Current Project progress page has been created here. Also, the Labview VI has been uploaded: Labview VI
• 9/1/06 Project timeline has been posted here and the code for the AVR development board has been uploaded: AVR code
• 8/23/06 IK Arm meetings will resume soon. Check back for updates

Important Items

• Project Timeline
• Current Progress
• AVR code to translate IK motor driver and sensor data to RS-232: AVR code
• IK arm Labview VI code: Labview VI

System Components

• Robot to Computer Interface
• Forward Kinematic control
• Inverse Kinematic control
• Path planning and hybrid control

Links

• National Instruments Developer zone (Labview coding resources)

Motor Controller Docs

Pictures courtesy of Ben Johnson