A control system of a ping-pong robot arm based on fuzzy method

This paper presents a 6-revolutional degree of freedoms (DOFs) low-cost arm of a ping-pong robot driven by 6 actuators. Design, control, simulation and performance of this arm are examined in this paper. The task in this study is to make the ping-pong ball stay in the racket at a balanced location. The arm comprises three main components, a three DOFs arm, a spherical wrist, and a ping-pong racket. A key design goal of the control is the timeliness: controller has to meet the requirements of the real-time operation speed. Therefore, to enhance the speed of calculation and reduce the cost, the arm manipulating control has been implemented based on fuzzy algorithm and is accomplished using an ATmega128 MCU, which is able to calculate the angular position of joints real-time. Infrared touch screen is installed as a sensor to automatically obtain the position of the ball, according to which controller adjusts the orientation of the wrist in order to keep the ball in racket. Experimental results illustrate the efficacy in the arm and racket system.