DEVELOPMENT OF AN ARTICULATION ROBOT ARM

This article describes the design of an articulation robot arm with seven joints. The control core of the robot arm is the module-based system built using the Mitsubishi Q series programming logical controller (PLC). The robot arm contains seven AC servomotors, seven driver devices, a vision system and a PLC control system. The PLC-based controller programs the motion trajectory of the gripper to catch or hold the objects and finish the assigned tasks. Kinect system (Asus Xtion Pro-Live, or called RGB-D sensor) acts as the vision system to recognize shape and color of each object. During the experiments, we found that the robot arm recognizes the shape and color of each object, and catches each object moving to the assigned box with the same color.