This Delta robot is the result of the work done by Piyush Patel, Ramanjaneyulu Gayakawada, Shiv Pratp Singh, and Sourabh Pandey (B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering, 2015-2019) under the guidance of Dr. Vivek Kumar Mehta.
The robot was developed in 1980s and very advanced versions of it are already available in the market. However, we chose it as our final year project because the purpose was to come up with an automated system by implementing our mathematical and computer programming skills. Also, we got an opportunity to learn about some new electronic components like stepper motors and Arduino. The robot had been fabricated using wood, teflon tape, cycle spokes and ball joints. We did the mathematical formulation for Forward and Inverse position kinematics. Also, we developed codes for processing the position kinematics of the robot. To control the movement of stepper motors, we developed a motion control algorithm in Arduino.
A Graphical User Inteface (GUI) was also developed in Python by us so that the Delta robot can be controlled easily. The robot is capable of drawing basic 2-D shapes: square, circle, and triangle. Also, it can draw the sketch of any image (See the video here). For this, all we have to do is to make a G-code file from the image file using makerCam.com or INKscape ( our choice). A text file of the x, y- coordinates extracted from it and uploaded into the main code. The code reads the file, the inverse position kinematics calculates the input angles (angles through which the three biceps turn with reference to a horizontal line) and this information is sent to the motors by Arduino.
This work does not take into account the time taken for completing a task. Hence, no velocity, acceleration, and any dynamic analysis has been done. However, a future study and extension of this work can lead to the development of this robot in terms of both performance and utility.