Vision-Based Robot Manipulator Design

In this paper, a robot with a manipulator, two vision systems, and a three-wheeled omni-directional mobile platform is designed and implemented. A shoulder, an elbow, a wrist, and a movable gripper are designed to let the robot manipulator have 5 degrees of freedom (DOF). The forward kinematics and inverse kinematics are applied to control the manipulator. The forward kinematics is obtained by the D-H (Denavit-Hartenberg) coordinate. The D-H matrix is a coordinate transformed matrix from one coordinate frame to the next one. The inverse kinematics is constructed by the geometry. Two vision systems are applied to search the object and control the manipulator to pick up it. A static camera is used to construct one vision system to get the environment information. An eye-in-hand camera is used to construct the other vision system to track a specific object. Some experimental results are described. The robot manipulator is controlled to draw a picture by using the direct kinematics and geometric inverse kinematics.