Live Remote Control of Robot with Replaced Controller

I worked with another graduate student in mechanical engineering at NIU on a project to replace the controller of an old CRS robot. Each joint was controlled by an arduino, and the arduino’s were coordinated by a computer. The computer ran a python program which went joint position commands to the arduinos and served a webpage which served as the teach pendant. The webpage had a drag and drop cartesean view that I wrote where the user could rotate their view and visualize what the coordinates were. The web control page also had webcams streaming that showed the real position of the robot, which would allow someone to control the robot from the other side of the world.

Here is the thesis my colleague published using some of my work on the GUI. We called it Frankenstein’s robot because it was sitting essentially useless since the controller was old and didn’t work. So we brought it back to life by merging components from other things.