Posts

Controlling robotic arm with Arduino and USB mouse

Many people asked me to post a video showing an arm from inverse kinematics article in action. While making a video, I realized that shots of the arm following a pattern of computer-generated coordinates is going to be less than exciting and decided to add manual control. The video below shows the result. In addition to the video, a HID introductory page has been written describing HID communication basics as well as some simple Arduino code. Enjoy! ( Youtube link, where HD quality video can be selected ).

Arduino sketch written for this video is on gitHub.

Robotic Arm Inverse Kinematics on Arduino

Lynxmotion AL5D robotic arm

Lynxmotion AL5D robotic arm


I’m proud owner of Lynxmotion AL5D robotic arm. The parts kit is of very high quality, and as a result, the arm is very strong and versatile. I wanted my arm to be portable and independent of big computers and all currently available controllers lack flexibility that I needed, therefore I started building my own controller around Arduino platform. This article shows first preliminary result of this work – inverse kinematics code which would be used to position the arm.

In robotics, inverse kinematics is a method to position a tip of some linked stricture in 3D space by calculating joint angles from tip X, Y, and Z coordinates. Much information about the subject exists on the web, for example, this introductory article explains the subject using simple trigonometry.

To move the arm, six servos need to be controlled ( five for the arm without wrist rotate ). Given that large amount of processing time would be spent calculating servo angles, I decided not to drive servos directly from Arduino pins and made simple servo shield using Renbotics schematic and library code. I built only half of the circuit using single 4017 counter – this gives me seven servo control channels, which is plenty.

In addition to the article linked above, I’d like to mention two other resources, which helped me tremendously during code development. First is Micromega Application Note 44, which shows inverse kinematics equations for similar arm. They also have nice video of working arm. It should be noted that gripper of AL5D arm has much simpler geometry, therefore second order polynomial calculations are not necessary. The second one is this Lynxmotion project page with Excel spreadsheet. Many formulas from the spreadsheet were used in my code; I also used the spreadsheet during debugging after modifying arm dimensions.

Below is first working draft of inverse kinematics code. It can be used as-is or transformed into a library. As presented, it shall be used with caution – no boundary check is performed so it is quite easy to inadvertently send the arm flying into your forehead or the control board. The code uses single-precision floating point math, which seems to be adequate for the task.


Continue reading Robotic Arm Inverse Kinematics on Arduino