In addition to the ability of robustly reaching for an
object in space, it is also vital that the robot has some way
of autonomously discovering such objects, determining
whether they are capable of manipulation, and relaying the
coordinates to the arm for positioning. There has been work
done in the area of manipulating objects without the ability
of autonomously determining their position ([5, 6]). The
approach in this paper is similar to that used by Xu et al.
[6], in which an end effector is capable of retrieving various
objects from the floor. The robot is assumed to have already
located an object through various means and positioned
itself in the correct orientation in front of the object. This
robust grasping algorithm can then be combined with other
work involving path planning, obstacle avoidance, and
object tracking in order to produce a more capable robot.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces
the hardware components needed in this project. Section 3
describes the geometric approach in the modeling and
analysis of the robot arm kinematics. Section 4 presents the
object detection strategies for a moving robot. Sections 5
and 6 are the mechanical design and the electrical design
of the robot arm, respectively. Section 7 illustrates the
implementation of the robotic arm system, which can detect