Autonomous 4DOF robotic manipulator prototype for industrial environment and human cooperation

Abstract

This paper describes the design and development of an autonomous robotic manipulator with four degrees of freedom. The manipulator is named RACHIE - "Robotic Arm for Collaboration with Humans in Industrial Environment". The idea was to create a smaller version of the industrial manipulators available on the market. The mechanical and electronic components are presented as well as the software algorithms implemented on the robot. The manipulator has as its primary goal the detection and organization of cans by color and defects. The robot can detect a human operator so it can deliver defective cans by collaborating with him/her on an industrial environment. To be able to perform such task, the robot has implemented a machine learning algorithm, a Haar feature-based cascade classifier, on its vision system to detect cans and humans. On the handler motion, direct and inverse kinematics were calculated and implemented, and its equations are described in this paper. This robot presents high reliability and robustness in the task assigned. It is low-cost as it is a small version of commercial ones, making it optimized for smaller tasks.