5+1 DOF 3D Printer Robot Arm

Rendering sketch

Keywords: Course Project, Mechatronics Design, D-H Matrix, Jacobian Matrix, VTK 3D Rendering Engine, Synchronous Motion on both Simulation and Real

Tutor: Prof. Wende Ke (SUSTech, Shenzhen China)

Members: Shenggao Li, Cong Shen, Xiaoyu Zhang

Brief: The traditional 3D printer only has 3 degree of freedom, generally speaking, is not a big deal. But in some situation, it really become a limitation of the 3D printer. We wanted to create a multi DOF 3D printer robot. As we all know, the nozzle of the 3D printer can been seem as a 5 DOF cylinder, therefore we decided to make a 5 DOF robot arm. But we found that the flexibility of the nozzle is still not ideal, so we added one DOF on the print platform. We called it "5+1 DOF 3D Printer Robot Arm".

Electronic System

We choose Arduino UNO board as the low level motion control board and use PC to communication, calculate and control the whole robot.

We utilize both the step-motor and servo-motor, that bring us some challenge to control them at the same time on the same board.

The safety protection system is the first thing we considered, so there are a thoroughly safety protection built on the limitation switch, stop switch and high speed interrupt I/O port.

Mechanical Design

The gear ratio on the step motor is 10:1. Which can prove the motor torque is strong enough to move the robot arm.

We decided to manufacture the parts by ourselves.

Synchronous Motion on both Simulation and Real

The other highlight part of this project is I built a rendering platform based on the VTK rendering engine and make the locomotion of real robot and the rendering model synchronous. Which can help us to estimate the result of our control command before we run it on the real robot and to monitor the 3D printer processing by the screen.

Report

5+1自由度3D打印机器臂.pdf