Anthropomorphic Robotic Arm using FPGA

The project's objective is the realization of a robot arm and its control system.
The project is divided into three phases: Implementation of the mechanical structure of the arm; Implementation of the control, capable to interface with an external controller via a wireless communication system; Test and evaluation of the results.

The first part of the project will focus on the construction of the arm, which will have six degrees of freedom and a spherical wrist that will be connected to an sensorized end-effector. The latter is a clamp with sensors in optoelectronic technology, capable of verifying the actual grasped object (to avoid motor overload and deformation or breakage of the grasped objects). The sensor is connected to an A/D converter which will interface with the elaboration system via SPI protocol.

In the second part we are going to use the FPGA to implement a control system using a System-on-chip, made of: a NIOS processor; a SPI module to communicate with the sensors; a Serial communication module to receive, via wireless, commands sent from a remote controller.

The NIOS processor will deal to: process the algorithm of inverse kinematics, generate the signals for the control of servomotors and to manage the protocols to communicate with the controller and the A/D converter.

In the final phase of the project we are going to run some experiments of grasping objects in the available workspace, to verify system performance in terms of speed and precision in the execution of the task (changing, for each test, type of the object to grasp and distance of the controller).

The choice of using the Altera FPGA technology is driven by the need to create: A real time control system, to process required algorithms in a minimum time; An embedded system, in order to decrease the cost of the application in terms of both energy and space (required by the use of a personal computer), and to improve overall performance than using a banal microcontroller.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Robotic Arm
• Anthropomorphism
• FPGA
• Real Time
• Embedded System
• Robotic
• Robot
• Anthropomorphic Arm