Design and implementation of a 4-axis RC servo driven robot manipulator

In this study, a robot manipulator, having four axes with a gripper, controllable with a PIC family microcontroller servo motor driver card is designed. The driver card used in this thesis is capable of driving six rc servo motors and the card we used for the serial communication was built with using printed circuit assembly technique. An interface is developed with Visual Basic and the control of the robot is accomplished through this interface. If necessary the robot manipulator can be used in self control mode by replacing the code embedded in the PIC with the one written for this purpose. Considering the hardware requirements, the PIC family?s middle class microcontroller is chosen. The motor driver card and the card for the serial communications are designed in the computer environment. As a result of the initial studies on the breadboard, a suitable driver card is designed to drive the motors of the robot manipulator. Aluminium composit was chosen in the makings of the robot arm whereas main body, linkage and gripper links are manufactured with laser cutting and cnc router.With the assistance of the PIC microprocessor embedded in the servo driver card, the robot arm can be directed to go to a desired position by teaching or it is possible to get the desired motions by the position data sent from the interface using serial communication protocols.