Palletizing Manipulator Design and Control Using Arduino and MATLAB

Robotic manipulators have many useful industrial applications. This paper describes the design and development of a palletizing manipulator robot system. The mechanical design is presented followed by derivation of the forward and inverse kinematics equations that describe the robot's motion. The control system and codes have been developed using MATLAB and Arduino to drive stepper motors that actuate the manipulator. The robot's motion equations have been tested and verified using MATLAB, LabVIEW and SOLIDWORKS. The simulated results were in good agreement with the actual performance of the robot. Finally, the manipulator's positioning errors were determined and discussed based on a number of repeatability experiments.