HIT-ARM I high speed dexterous robot arm

Abstract

A dexterous, light weight arm with high precision, high speed manoeuvrability has been built for playing ping-pong. It is based on the modular design concept. The 6 DOFs robot arm consists of two shoulder joints, two elbow joints and one wrist joint. Brushless DC motors and harmonic reducer with a large central hole are applied on the shoulder joints and the elbow joints. The wrist joints are characterized by a bevel gear differential mechanism and driven by two flat DC motors, through a harmonic reducer and timing belt arrangement. Each modular joint contains a joint torque sensor, a joint position sensor, a motor position sensor, a current sensor and a temperature sensor. In each joint, there is a Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) for communication and control of BLDC motors. The core of the arm controller is a Intel Core II processor with 2.0 GHz. A PCI board based on FPGA is used for the communication between the arm controller and joint electrical units. Experiment results show that the dexterous arm can play table tennis successfully.