Graduation Semester and Year

2018

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

First Advisor

Kamesh Subbarao

Abstract

Open chain manipulators are a well posed problem, however it was necessary to build a system customized to meet the needs of the Unmanned Ground Vehicle developed in the Aerospace Systems Laboratory. Considering that there are multiple such small ground vehicles, the main design constraint on the system was to be modular and lightwieght to enable quick swapping from both, a hardware and a software point of view. The purpose of this thesis is design, simulation and control a modular 5-Degree-of-Freedom manipulator with versatility in end effector configuration. This was achieved through the Robot Operating System which brings a high degree of cross platform flexibility with minimal code modification. The manipulator was simulated and tested to execute a cartesian-space trajectory using a singularity robust inverse kinematics algorithm. The experimental setup has a cyber-physical architecture to allow for the necessary intensive computations to be offloaded to a more powerful ground station.

Keywords

ROS, Manipulator, Inverse kinematics, Singularity

Disciplines

Aerospace Engineering | Engineering | Mechanical Engineering

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

27419-2.zip (6978 kB)

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.