Wireless Controlled Robotic Automation System

Abstract

The project is to develope a controller and to control a 6 DOF robotic arm for Pick & Place Application over wireless. The objective is to learn various types of control methods for the pick and place robotic arm for educational purpose uses. The 6-DOF robot arm is controlled by a serial servo controller circuit board. The controller board utilizes a Atmega328 microcontroller ( Boot loaded with Arduino Diecimila Bootloader ) from Atmel Corporation as the control system to control all the activities. The input sensors like potentiometers will send a the input signals to the microcontroller, then microcontroller will analyze the data accordingly and will send control signals to the output devices. This output signal basically turns ON or OFF the output devices such as servo motors. The servo controller board is connected to the serial port on a PC running the Microsoft Windows operating system. The ATMega328 will be programmed to run robot arm sequences independently by help of a FT232RL breakout board. Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) is used to develop the arduino sketch.
Various types of control methods have been implemented. Manual control of the Robotic arm by mirroring the designed prototype movements. Prototype was developed by help of sensors like potentiometers. Also automated control of the robotic arm has been realized. The controller is also interfaced with a XBee XBP24-AWI-001 wireless module for remote control of the robotic arm from a PC using a graphical user interface (GUI), which was designed using processing development environment (PDE).The EEPROM present in Atmega328 MC unit has been utilized to make the robotic arm learnable. i.e. it can learn the movements stored in the memory and can replay it whenever prompted remotely. Programming is done remotely and the output data is sent over wireless to control the robotic arm.