Robotic Arm

OVERVIEW

The robotic arm is a pioneer of modern robotics, and finds its applications in industries, laboratories, human-assisted operations, medical robotics and even in prosthesis.
Kriti, the 3-DOF robotic arm, is a single-handed attempt to replicate the prodigy and a doorway to learn and culminate Mechanical Design, Image Processing and Syndicated programming. The robot can perform simple pick-and-place operations.

INSIGHT

THE VISION

The system employed the use of an overhead camera, which detects the current and target position of the object relative to the bot.
Colored markers were used for the detection of the positions of the bot, pick-up and land. The locations of these markers, multiplied by the camera matrix gave us the respective values in world coordinates upto a good approximaton

THE BRAIN

MATLAB is a fast, versatile numerical computing environment. Our system uses MATLAB for processing the image, calculating the positions, followed by calculating the inverse kinematics for our arm. The motor angles were then published to the USB port in a serial manner.

THE CORTEX

The OpenCM9.04 is an open-source microcontroller board based on 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3. This device converts the motor angles calculated by MATLAB from USB to a 32-bit binary stream for the motors to understand.

THE DESIGN

The robotic arm was design in SolidWorks software and the links were 3D printed in ABS material.
The end-effector design was inspired by a lobster's claw, which gave us the versatility to grab objects of different sizes.
Dynamixel AX-12 motors were used for the actuation.

TECH SPECS

ACTUATORS

Motors Dynamixel AX-12A
Weight 55 gm
Stall Torque 15.3 kg-cm
Angle of rotation 300 degree or continuous turn
Size 32 x 50 x 40 mm

robotic arm