Control Design and Novel Applications for the SCARA Robot(3/3)

In recent years, the Ministry of Economic Affairs brought out an important policy to enhance the competitiveness of Taiwan's machine tool industry, emphasize the strengthening of Taiwan's machine tool industry controller autonomy, and increase the rate of import substitution. Further, MOEA claims that fostering talents for industry control software applications is another important principle of Taiwan. According to the survey report of MOEA, 2013 domestic machine tool controllers demand is about 55,000 units, in which about 40,000 units are imported from abroad. Only 15,000 units are made in Taiwan and the domestic self-sufficiency rate is about 27%. Hence, Taiwan has to speed up the step to made machine control tools by itself for the needs of industry. So this project is trying to shift our laboratory robotics research focus to the study of industrial robots.This project wants to study the motion control design, machine vision establishment and control demonstration for a very popular industrial robots “SCARA (Selectively Compliance Assembly Robot Arm) robot”. It is well known that the SCARA robot has four joints, three joint axis of rotation parallel to each other to achieve the plane moving, rotating and positioning, and a joint in the end of the robot to do up-and down movement of the article. The SCARA robot has the following advantages such as high precision, high speed, high rigidity, small size, and high freedom. It is often used in factory automation for welding, dispensing, plug-ins, pick-up, testing, and other functions. The execution of this project is for three years. In the first year, we will purchase a SCARA robot, and establish the robotic arm system model, design the motion control and optimal trajectory planning. Furthermore, combining the driver and controller of the robot to only one board is the second task. In the second year, we will build a machine vision system which has the functions including the target object recognition, image distortion correction for the coordinate positions, so that the robotic arm can be used for goods identification, picking, classifying work. In the third year, we will implement some demonstrations for the SCARA robot. In my current plan, there are three demonstrations to be shown, they are 1. making red bean cakes, 2. replying the questions from human by spelling characters, and 3. checking the bar code and deliver the bottle to guests. However, we have to emphasize that the above three demonstrations are the current ideas, some new and better ideas may be created to replace the original ideas after executing two years progress such that the SCARA robot has much more functions to interact with people.I believe that the students can learn a lot of about the robot model establishment, robot arm’s motion control analysis and design, machine vision system building, and the ability of industrial robot using, as well as more creative ability training for the industrial robot applications. Therefore, the students can have more sufficient and solid abilities to enter the job market. On the other hand, the achievement of this project may propose a reference for the machine tools development in Taiwan’s industries.