Simulation, Control and Testing of a Custom 5-DOF Robotic Manipulator System

Abstract

Open chain manipulators are a well posed problem, however it was necessary to build a system customized to meet the needs of the Unmanned Ground Vehicle developed in the Aerospace Systems Laboratory. Considering that there are multiple such small ground vehicles, the main design constraint on the system was to be modular and lightwieght to enable quick swapping from both, a hardware and a software point of view. The purpose of this thesis is design, simulation and control a modular 5-Degree-of-Freedom manipulator with versatility in end effector configuration. This was achieved through the Robot Operating System which brings a high degree of cross platform flexibility with minimal code modification. The manipulator was simulated and tested to execute a cartesian-space trajectory using a singularity robust inverse kinematics algorithm. The experimental setup has a cyber-physical architecture to allow for the necessary intensive computations to be offloaded to a more powerful ground station.