Constructing a high-performance robot from commercially available parts

Abstract

Robot manipulators were the topic of this article. A large number of robot manipulators have been designed over the last half century, and several of these have become standard platforms for R&D efforts. The most widely used is the Unimate PUMA 560 series. Recently, there have been attempts to utilize standard platforms, as exemplified by the learning applied to ground robots (LAGRs) program organized by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The RobotCub project has also made a few robots available to the research community. As actuation systems have become more powerful and miniaturized, it has become possible to build dynamical robot systems to perform dynamic tasks.However, for research work, it is often a challenge to get access to a high-performance robot, which is also available to other researchers. In many respects, robotics has lacked standard systems based upon which comparative research could be performed. Too much research is performed on a basis that cannotbe replicated, reproduced, or reused. For basic manipulation, there has until recently been limited access to light weight manipulators with good dynamics.In this article, it describe the design of a high-performance robot manipulator that is built from components off the shelf to allow easy replication. In addition, it was designed to have enough dynamics to allow ball catching, which in reality implies that the system has adequate dynamics for most tasks.