Remote Control of Colour-tracking Robotic Arm

Project information:

  • Category: Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) [Github Link]
  • Year: 2023
  • Supervisor: Prof.Thomas Parisini and Dr. Kaiwen Chen
  • Location: Imperial College London, London, UK

I developed a 4-DOF robotic arm with color-tracking capabilities, utilizing remote control within the ROS2 framework. This project integrated a USB camera as a sensor within the feedback loop to effectively manage bus servo motors.

Composition of the robotic arm

Geometric inverse kinematics analysis was employed to calculate joint variables based on end-effector position and orientation. To control the motors, a Raspberry Pi was employed to transmit commands through UART while simultaneously publishing image frames to ROS2 topics. Additionally, I implemented controller separation on a remote machine, allowing communication with the local node through the ROS2 network, and subsequently conducted an in-depth analysis of stability margins. Furthermore, I built a 2nd order transfer function model by exploring the step response of one of the motors.

On the left, utilisation factor of a station in a week is shown. Right, predicted and ground truth utilisation rate.