FPGA based robot arm with controller

Date

3-2007

Degree

Bachelor of Science in Applied Physics

College

College of Arts and Sciences (CAS)

Adviser/Committee Chair

Kristoffer O Dela Peña

Abstract

This study presents an alternative way of controlling a robot arm by designing, implementing, and testing both the constructed hardware and the developed software for the realization of an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based robot arm controller. To accomplish this objective, a miniature of the robot arm was constructed using a potentiometer and PICMe® microcontroller to convert the analog signal into a digital signal and serve as the controller of the robot arm manipulator. It is emphasized in this study that the Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA® kit be used instead of having three or more microcontrollers to drive the servo motors. This is because of the FPGA's ability to simultaneously control as many as eight servo motors. Its purpose is also to synthesize the functions of 3 or more microcontrollers including servo motor driver, servo motor sequencer, and the main servo motor controller into one FPGA® kit for simultaneous and parallel transmission of data instead of serial transmission resulting to a faster and more efficient transfer of data needed by the servo motors. As expected, the miniature robot arm controller was able to direct the robot arm controller and, based from the results, it attained at most a standard deviation of 1.1°. The only problem encountered was the inaccuracy of the servo motor when it is in the range of 0° to 30° and range of 150° to 180° which could be attributed to the servo motor used. The result of this study could help future robotics researchers on how to manipulate a robot arm using a VHDL program embedded on the Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA® kit and the control of a robot arm using the miniature robot arm controller.

Language

English

Location

UPLB Main Library Special Collections Section (USCS)

Call Number

Thesis

Document Type

Thesis

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