For more than ten years, students at the Robotics Working Group of the Technical University of Dresden, or TURAG for short, have been developing mobile robotics solutions independently for participation in national and international competitions. The Eurobot robotics contest, which is held once a year in France, is the main motivation for the working group.
The robot to be built with a base area of about 30 x 30 centimeters must be able to repeatedly recognize different objects in an action space of 2 x 3 meters, pick them up and place them elsewhere while taking various evaluation criteria into account. Due to the limited space in the robot, a core aspect of the mechanical design is the layout of highly specialized actuators, which are newly developed every year according to the task assigned.
In the current competition season, hexagons with a diameter of 15 centimeters, referred to as samples, have to be handled. For this purpose, the robot is equipped with two symmetrically acting gripper assemblies that can pick up the samples and place them at one of a total of six storage locations in the robot. Each gripper arm has three degrees of freedom, moved by stepper motors. The desired storage location can be selected by lifting, lowering, and rotating the arm. Swiveling allows a sample to be transferred from one gripper arm to the other.
Trinamic’s 6-axes TMCM-6214 motor controller/driver board is a perfect fit for controlling these stepper motors and the integration of its six axes on a single board saves both space and development effort. The actuators can be controlled with little effort from the robot’s central processing unit using the intuitive TMCL interface. All relevant axis parameters can be configured easily and quickly via the TMCL-IDE already in advance. By combining this with a three-dimensional Dijkstra’s algorithm on the central computing unit, the best actuator trajectory is first calculated and then sent as a packet to the driver module. This allows the TMCM-6214 to provide the best possible integrated control solution for TURAG’s specialized actuators.
