RoboKit
The RoboKit was designed for work in the Introduction to Robotics and Mechatronics course. The kit is intended to be used to allow a wide variety of different mechatronic experiments to be performed with it, and when doing so avoid having large amounts of electronic setup each time. This kit enables the students to start at the beginning of the semester with simple data acqusition tasks and expand to building and controlling a simple 3DOF manipulator.
One of the most time consuming excercise for students in laboratory sessions can be setting up the experiments themselves. Much of this delay comes from students wiring of the individual experiments. It can take from minutes to hours to track down a faulty connection in a student's project. While this in itself is a learning experience, it is not the intended one for this course. The RoboKit provides a solution to this problem and helps enable instructors to focus on the main tasks of the lecture. The I/O functionality of the RoboKit is handled by a Sensoray 626 PCI data acqusition card. The control box itself initially breaks out the I/O connections from the data acqusition card to easy to use headers. Along with raw access to the I/O pins other features such as power amplifiers, limit switches, and emergency stops are provided in the box. The connections are arranged in a standard fashion which allows sensors and actuators to be used with other robotic systems in IRIS such as MARVIN.
Accompanying the RobKit is our 3 DOF RoboArm, which is intended to introduce students to kinematic systems. The students first encounter with the RoboArm is with only the base and a DC motor. After learning to control that simple system, the remainder of the RoboArm is added and students are exposed to kinematic and inverse kinematic concepts. By the time the students have reached that point in the lecture, they have learned to control every aspect of the RoboArm in different segments of the course. Students are now directly able to see how decisions or challenges at one level directly influence the remainder of the system. In later courses, students are able to use the same RoboArm to further explore kinematic concepts. By reusing the same hardware, the transition time for students can be greatly reduced.
The control code for the RoboKit and RoboArm is written entirely in C. This was intentionally chosen to keep the students close to the hardware of the system, but still provide them with modern features such as debuggers. Linux was chosen as the development environment because it allows the students closer contact with the low-level process of building programs such as Makefiles, the compiler, and linker.
