Robotic crane

Let's Make Robots Robots
1

I made a crane from Merkur( something like Meccano). It has two motors, one with encoder. The position of the hook is sensed by the encoder and the position of the second moving part is sensed by potenciometer. It comunicates with computer via serial port. It is controlled by a gamepad.

  • Actuators / output devices: 2 geared motors
  • Control method: Serial RS232
  • CPU: Picaxe 20M
  • Sensors / input devices: potenciometers, encoder
  • Target environment: indoor
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/robotic-crane
2

Pretty cool zthom, haven’t

Pretty cool zthom, haven’t seen a crane on here before =)

Do you use any kind of inverse kinematics for positioning the hook, or is it all through manual control and taught positions?

3

For this video no, it uses

For this video no, it uses only taught positions. But it has inverse kinematics integrated and working. But I have a problem with the encoder of hook position, it is not accurate enought. When  I move it up a down a few times, the hooks ends up in diferent positions. Moving left and right uses a potenciometer and its very accurate.