Development of a low-cost teleoperated and semi-autonomous robotic arm

Abstract

A safe human-robot physical interaction is required when the robot is used to help humans. This can be achieved by introducing a teleoperated robotic arm in which a human can teach the robot before performing tasks remotely. This paper develops and establishes a three-degree-of-freedom robotic arm and teaching pendant. In particular, a flexible robotic arm is operated in two different modes, namely, the teleoperated mode and the semi-autonomous mode. The teleoperated mode is a manual control using a teaching pendant, where the robot arm replicates various movements of the teaching pendant. On the contrary, the semi-autonomous mode allows the robot to execute a task from one point to another point repetitively after at least one training of the teaching pendant. The Arduino Uno board is employed as a microcontroller, and the integrated development environment ( IDE ) software is used to write and upload the computer code. A series of tests in which the robot performs different tasks is recorded to evaluate the accuracy and consistency of the semi-autonomous and teleoperated modes. The results show that the performance of the proposed low-cost teleoperated robotic arm is reliable and safe to perform various tasks based on the teaching pendant.