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Lab Session Robotics

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Lab Session Robotics

Uploaded by

jcoiii
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Lab Session Robotics

October 2023

1 General Notes
1. This lab session will cover the experimental application of all the three
assignments involving Kinematics, Jacobians and Trajectories. This
task accounts for 1 point (70% lab +30% report ).
2. To grade your lab work, please SHOW TA the motion of your real
robot arm to gain 70% of the lab work, the left 30% point will be
graded by your mini-report. Please hand in it no later than 23:59 on
27th October.
3. Please send your lab report to BRIGHTSPACE, named using the fol-
lowing syntax GroupNumber labreport.zip.

2 How to work with the robotic arm


Connect the robot to your computer and start MATLAB. Firstly, add the
toolbox into the workpath and the RTB toolbox (all materials can be down-
loaded from brightspace):
>> addpath(’add your local path here...\rvctools\common’)
>> addpath(’add your local path here...\rvctools\robot\interfaces’)
Then check the port COMx of the robot arm:
>> arb = Arbotix(’port’,’COMx’,’baud’, 57600)
This command corresponds to the connection of the robot #x. To adapt
it for your robot, change the last number in the command above. Now you
have a connection to the robot through the workspace class variable arb.
Let’s start with something innocuous, taking the temperature of the servo
motors

1
>> arb.gettemp

ans =

32 34 33 31 31 34

which is the temperature of each servo motor in degrees Celsius. Now let’s
get the actual angle of joint 1, the waist joint

>> arb.getpos(1)

ans =

0.7414

which is the angle in radians. Of course, for your robot you will most likely
get a different answer. You can get the joint angle for the other joints in a
similar way. We can get all the joint angles simultaneously.

>> arb.getpos()

ans =

0.7414 -1.9124 -0.2096 0.0511 0.1841 -0.0869

Now let’s try a cautious motion, we will move the gripper

>> arb.setpos(6,1)

And back

>> arb.setpos(6,0)

Now let’s move the whole robot to the zero configuration

>> arb.setpos([0 0 0 0 0 0])

The robot is quite rigid since the Dynamixel servos are doing their job
very well. We can relax the robot by

>> arb.relax

which puts all the servos into a zero torque mode and we move the joints by
hand. The only force we feel is due to the friction in the Dynamixel gearbox.
To send the whole trajectory to the robot you can use the command

2
>> dt = 0.01;
>> arb.setpath(qTraj,dt);

where qT raj is a N × 6 vector of set-points and dt is a time step between two


sequential set-points. To realize model-based control strategies we need to
have the formal representation of the robotic arm. We can create a kinematic
model of the robot by

>> mdl_arbotix

which creates the workspace variables mArb (the robot)1 . Although the
robot has 6 servo motors, since one is the gripper, this robot has only five
joints.

>> mArb

mArb =

Arbotix (5 axis, RRRRR, modDH, slowRNE)

+---+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
| j | theta | d | a | alpha | offset |
+---+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
| 1| q1| 0| 0| 0| 1.571|
| 2| q2| 0| 0| -1.571| -1.571|
| 3| q3| 0| 17| 0| 1.571|
| 4| q4| 11| 4| 1.571| 1.571|
| 5| q5| 0| 0| 1.571| 0|
+---+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+

grav = 0 base = 1 0 0 25 tool = 0 -1 0 0


0 0 1 0 25 0 0 1 9
9.81 0 0 1 17 -1 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1

Let’s plot the robot in its zero angle pose

>> mArb.plot([0 0 0 0 0])

and we see it is standing straight up. We can drive the graphical robot
around using the virtual teach pendant
1
You can find the details on how a robotic arm model is created, via the Peter Corke
open source robotics toolbox, into the toolbox manual available in BrightSpace.

3
>> mArb.teach

and manipulating the sliders causes the graphical robot to move. Note the
coordinate frames of the world and of the tool.

3 Lab Task (1 = 0.7% lab +0.3% report )


The main goal of the joint space control is to design a feedback controller
such that the joint coordinates track the desired motion as closely as possi-
ble. Firstly, the desired motion, which is described in terms of end-effector
coordinates, is converted to a corresponding joint trajectory using the inverse
kinematics of the manipulator. Then the feedback controller determines the
new set-points for joints local controllers to move the manipulator along the
desired trajectory specified in joint coordinates starting from measurements
of the current joint states. Due to its simple structure, this kind of control
schemes offers many advantages. For example, by using independent-joint
control, communication among different joints is saved. Moreover, since the
computational load of controllers may be reduced, only low-cost hardware is
required in actual implementations. Finally, independent-joint control has
the feature of scalability, since the controllers on all the joints have the same
formulation.

3.1 Description of the task:


1. Define two positions in the workspace pa = [xa , ya , za ]⊤ and pb =
[xb , yb , zb ]⊤ and determine the appropriate configurations of joints. (Hint:
try the command mArb.ikine (·))

2. Plan a smooth trajectory between these points (Hint: try the command
j traj(·))

3. Save the trajectory points as a matrix in the workspace variable and


check your result based on mathematical model of the robot. Plot
the resulting trajectory of the end-effector (Hint: try the command
mArb.fkine (·)).

4. Apply this trajectory for the real robotic arm. Compare the perfor-
mance of robot arm and your simulation result.

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