New Interface using Beaglebone Black for 4-DOF Robot Arm System

This paper describes the application of a microcontroller as the interface device for a four degree of freedom (DOF) robot arm. In the previous development of the robot arm, a microcontroller Arduino Mega 2560 was used as the interface device to run all four joint motors of arm replacing PCI board which could only produce two analogue outputs. However, Arduino Mega 2560 was observed to produce slow computation for real-time application. Thus, the objective of this study is to apply another type of microcontroller that could solve the communication problem between the hardware, the sensors and the host computer. The features of the new microcontroller were investigated in terms of sufficient number of analogue/digital outputs, compatibility of programming software and other technical specifications to fulfill the robot's system requirement. Compared to the previous Arduino controller, the result proved that with the application of Beaglebone Black as the interface device, the closed-loop control of all motor run smoothly with almost four times faster than Arduino Mega 2560 and applicable for multiple analog outputs. Thus, the system interface can be applied to run the combined systems of the robot arm and the hand which requires reliable communication of input/output signals and fast computation time for control in the future.