A Geometric Approach for Robotic Arm Kinematics with Hardware Design, Electrical Design, and Implementation.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Robotics Volume 2010, Article ID 984823, 10 pages doi:10.1155/2010/984823 Research Article A Geometric Approach for Robotic Arm Kinematics with Hardware Design, Electrical Design, and Implementation Kurt E. Clothier and Ying Shang Department of Electrical Computer Engineering, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Campus Box 1801, Edwardsville, IL 62026, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Ying Shang, yshang@ Received 24 May 2010; Accepted 18 August 2010 Academic Editor: Huosheng Hu Copyright © 2010 K. E. Clothier and Y. Shang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper presents a geometric approach to solve the unknown joint angles required for the autonomous positioning of a robotic arm. A plethora of complex mathematical processes is reduced using basic trigonometric in the modeling of the robotic arm. This modeling and analysis approach is tested using a five-degree-of-freedom arm with a gripper style end effector mounted to an iRobot Create mobile platform. The geometric method is easily modifiable for similar robotic system architectures and provides the capability of local autonomy to a system which is very difficult to manually control. 1. Introduction In addition to the ability of robustly reaching for an object in space, it is also vital that the robot has some way As technology increases, robots not only become self- of autonomously discovering such objects, determ