TELEOPERATED ROBOTIC ARMS WITH OPEN AND CLOSED LOOP CONTROL SYSTEMS

Abstract

This paper examines the usage of telemetry for the six degrees of freedom robotic arm designed to compete on a mars rover in the 2019 University Rover Challenge. The arm utilizes three microcontrollers to receive control commands and translates them directly to motor signals for the six brushed DC motors. The usage of the 32-bit microcontrollers facilitates inverse kinematics, an intuitive process that allows commands to be sent as 3D coordinates to the arm, ensuring fine control for arm manipulation. Telemetry is transmitted from the rover to a remote base station over a 900 MHz RF link, using two omnidirectional cloverleaf antennas. Communication between the embedded systems is achieved with the ethernet User Datagram Protocol standard. This ensures seamless transferal of commands from the driver’s joystick to the arm, and a stream of telemetry containing motor currents, positional values, and limit switch states - a necessity for the open and closed loop control systems.