Design and Control of a 6-DOF mechanical manipulator

This thesis consists of the development in all its aspects of a 6-dof anthropomorphic manipulator attachment for the RoboTO team's fleet of remote controlled mobile robots. After a brief introduction, the project requirements are discussed, including the manipulator's objectives and design constraints, followed by an overview of robotic manipulators and a discussion into alternative design solutions. These introductory chapters are followed by the mechanical design of the manipulator in SolidWorks, entailing the motor choice, selection of stock components to use in the assembly, and design of custom parts, a portion of which were designed with 3-D printing capabilities in mind. The whole manipulator assembly is divided into two distinct modules: the shoulder, a simple serial robot, and the wrist which is a spherical in nature and rather compact thanks to the presence of a differential assembly controlling two of the three axes of rotation. The work proceeds with a discussion into forward, differential, and inverse kinematics for which the Denavit-Hartenberg convention is employed. Following this discussion on kinematics the SolidWorks model, exported to Matlab via Simulink's multibody link plugin, is simulated and used as the plant in the control loops to test various control schemes which are suitable for remote control. Having settled on a control scheme the next step is writing code in C to add to the already preexisting code base of the RoboTO team, allowing for the control of the manipulator via an embedded STM32 microcontroller. The final step before the conclusion of the work is a stage of physical prototyping to verify the viability of both the mechanical design and control schema.