Joint Control Implementation of 4-DOF Robotic Arm Using Robot Operating System

The paper describes the joint position control implementation for 4 degrees of freedom (4-DOFs) robot manipulator with a robot operating system (ROS) that may be used for robotics courses. ROS contains various plugins and software packages for robots' data analysis used in robotic engineering education. To accomplish the position control of joints using the ROS, the connection between the Arduino controller board and ROS was created. Moreover, using the Arduino controller board, all motors of the 4-DOFs arm robot are controlled using a PID controller. The forward and inverse kinematic models for the 4-DOFs robot manipulator are also developed based on the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) method. The obtained DH parameters were used in the 3D kinematic model trajectory provided by the RoboAnalyzer software to determine the position, velocity, and acceleration plots for each joint. The direct and inverse kinematic models are used in the implementation of the position controller. The results further indicate that the proposed position control using the PID controller in ROS returns accurate tracking results in terms of minimum root mean squared errors (RMSEs) that can be used in the control of any industrial robot.