A Pick and Place Task with an KUKA Industrial Robot, Aided by an Arduino Board

Abstract

Work with industrial robots is a very challenge task. Those kinds of robots, usually, have an architecture very difficult to interact with and their programming language is not quite friendly. In the Robotics Laboratory of the Taubaté’s University, we have an industrial robot KUKA KR 6 R900 Sixx. In order to develop some research with focus in the robotics field and the applications of robotics in the industry we propose the development of these work, which has the idea to interact an industrial robot with a low-cost board (Arduino) to perform a pick and place task. To do so, we assembled an experimental setup, where a two-finger shape claw mounted on the end effector of the robot and controlled by an Arduino board, was used to pick an object and place it in a known position. The robot and the Arduino board are linked by the Kuka control unit, using digital ports in the PWM mode. After few tests and analyzing the results, we consider the performance of the system quite good.