ME446 PROJECT WEBSITE
LAB 1: KINEMATIC TRANSFORMATIONS
CRS ROBOT ARM
In this project, we worked on a "Catalyst-5 robot arm" which is manufactured by Thermo Electron corporation. Originally, the robot arm comprised of 5 Degrees of Freedom, however, the last two motors at the wrist were deactivated to restrict the motion to 3-DOF. This entire work is focused on testing and implementing different kinds of controllers to understand what are the pros/cons of each one when doing reference trajectory tracking. The entire work is divided into 4 main lab sections where we study forward/inverse kinematic analysis of the robot arm, PD & PID joint control, inverse dynamics joint control and impedance control. The final project is a culmination of everything where one needs to make the end effector follow a desired reference trajectory and do a certain task in the shortest possible time .
KINEMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE CRS ROBOT ARM
The first lab deals with forward and inverse kinematic analysis of the CRS robot arm. The forward kinematic analysis is performed by first, assigning coordinate frames to each link using the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) convention, and then computing the end effector position given the input motor angles. The computed DH table is then given as an input to Robotica, a robotics tool package of Mathematica, where one can find the resultant transformation matrix for finding the end effector position and the Jacobian, which is used for computing end effector velocity. The inverse kinematic analysis deals with computing the inverse problem, i.e, calculation of motor angles given the end effector position. In this case, we found this relation using geometry.