Mechatronic design and control of a planar cooperative robot

Abstract

This paper presents the simple mechatronic design and control of a planar cooperative robot. The system consists of a pair of three link robots carrying an end-effector on one end of each. The cooperative robot system is driven through a controller designed in MATLAB. The computer is interfaced with this system by using a PIC16F84A and PIC16F877 based circuit. The controller takes in input of the initial and final position of the object that has to be moved and calculates the angles that need to exist between the links. The controller then evaluates the pulses that need to be given to the motors and transfers them to the PIC circuit through a serial port. The PIC in turn generates the signal required for each motor to move. An important point to note is that there is only a certain region in which both the robots can exist at the same time. Some points of robot 1 are out of bounds for robot 2 due to mechanical constraints. So an important concept here is of error handling. The cooperative action is achieved by the two manipulators by limiting the work space in which the two manipulators work. The workspace limitation is taken care by the error handling. This type of robot can be used for cooperative handling of bakery products such as bread.