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URK: Utah Robot

Introduction

Designing and building an electro-mechanical system, such as a robot manipulator, requires a lot of tasks, starting with specifying the tasks and performance requirements, determining the robot configuration and parameters that are most suitable for the required tasks, ordering the parts and assembling the robot, developing the necessary software and hardware components (controller, simulator, monitor), and finally, testing the robot and measuring its performance.

Our goal is to build a framework for the optimal and flexible design of robot manipulators with the required software and hardware systems and modules which are independent of the design parameters, so that it can be used for different configurations and varying parameters. Figure 1 Shows a schematic view of the prototyping environment with its sub-systems and the interface.

A prototype three-link robot manipulator was built to determine the required sub-systems and interfaces to build the prototyping environment, and to provide hands-on experience for the real problems and difficulties that we would like to address and solve using this environment.