A Delta Robot was designed and developed for the ME3260 Mechatronic System Design Project (Semester 5). Delta Robot is a parallel manipulator commonly used in industries for pick and place operations. The All the kinematics were derived with the help of available literature and the robot dynamics (motor torques and forces acting on components) were simulated using MSC Adams and Solidworks.
Objectives
Design a functioning mechatronic system covering a significant area of what was learnt and practiced during the university until semester 5.
Using available literature to solve an engineering problem.
Familiarize with machining operations (milling, turning) and creating production drawings for CNC milling.
Familiarize with software tools (Solidworks, Adams, Ansys, MATLAB).
Motivation
Delta Robot is an industrial robot which is commonly used for picking items from a conveyor and sort them according to
Building industrial robots do not necessarily mean spending lots of money on expensive hardware. Built with fischertechnik (a construction toy originating from Germany) and controlled by an Arduino Mega, this delta robot is a fairly simple machine. Nonetheless, it does not lack speed or precision to fulfill its job: The robot picks items from a conveyor and sorts them by color similarly to industrial pick and place robots.
I was involved in designing the machine elements (including arm designing and optimization, bearing selection, shaft designing and so on), workspace analysis and developing the control system.
I developed the image processing program which was used to identify the objects of two different colors under the robot using OpenCV. The algorithm and the results will be discussed in another article.
The next problem was to find the optimum path to pick and place all the objects in to two different boxes for two colors, in other words; connecting the dots. It was identified that this optimization problem is similar to the well known travelling salesman problem (TSP) thus a modified version of the Genetic Algorithm was used to solve the path finding problem. The algorithm will be discussed in detail including the results in another article.
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