Design and Performance Tests of a Mobile Mechanical Manipulator

Mobile mechanical manipulators are one of the automation aspects which were revealed in last years of twentieth century. These machines assume the responsibility of human and gradually expand the domain of their activities in industry. This paper is a presentation of the Sweeper Robot designed in the Robotic Laboratory of Iran University of Science and Technology. The original design of this robot allowing to its gripper to constantly remain parallel to the ground is presented. The dynamic and kinematical models of the robot have been computed. A software was developed in MATLAB to validate the kinematical and dynamic models of the robot by comparison with the experimental results. Once the robot was built and its systematic odometric error estimated by experiment, a control scheme for linear motions was developed to deal with this error. The approach is based on the introduction of an initial rectifying offset motion before starting the linear motion. Eventually, classical line tracking and image processing algorithms were used to complete our robot and the efficiency of our design to achieve its mission in picking and placing different objects according to various algorithms.