A Smart Robot Arm Design for Industrial Application

The proposed paper outlines the design and implementation of smart robotic arm that is equipped with a vision system. Three main parts cooperate to perform the control of the proposed arm. Image processing, inverse kinematics and control are involved in the robot arm design. Forward and inverse kinematic are solved using homogenous transformation matrices and Denavit-Hartenberg's systematic representation of reference systems. The arm uses vision information imported from the processing of the captured image of the target object to decide how to proceed. The proposed system is implemented on Microcontroller PIC 16F877a. The code involves securing the system from power failure as well as hacking. The controller has the ability to detect power failure and fix it allowing the arm to proceed from the stopping point avoiding starting over again (retentive). Practical application of the proposed system shows that its ability to handle different objects whether it is learned before or not is superior.