Prototyping a Robotic Manipulator and Controller


 	     Tarek M. Sobh, Mohamed Dekhil, and Thomas C.Henderson



 
                                 UUCS-93-013

                                 June, 1993


                         Department of Computer Science
                              University of Utah
                         Salt Lake City, UT 84112 USA



                                    Abstract



Building a robot and its environment (control, software, hardware,
simulation, etc) is a complex task that requires the efforts of an experienced 
engineering team. Once a robot model has been chosen and a design has
been agreed upon, it becomes difficult to make design changes without
affecting the manufactured parts, actuators and sensors.
Therefore, developing an environment that enables flexible design
and reconfigurable links, joints, actuators, and sensors would be an essential
step for efficient prototyping. Such an environment should have the
right ``mix'' of software and hardware components for designing the
physical parts and controllers and for the algorithmic control and
specifications of the kinematics, inverse kinematics, dynamics, trajectory
planning, analog control and computer (digital) control of the manipulator.
Specifying object-based communications and catalog mechanisms between the
software (control, simulation, and monitoring) modules,
PPL hardware controllers, physical parts' CAD designs,
and actuator and sensor components is a necessary step in the
prototyping activities.
We discuss and present a framework and intermediate results in the
process of prototyping an experimental reconfigurable 3-link robot in this report.

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This work was supported in part by DARPA grant N00014-91-J-4123, NSF grant
CDA 9024721, and a University of Utah Research Committee grant.  All opinions,
findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this document are those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agencies.