Upgrading Gryphon PUMA Robot Arm Using ROS-MoveIt

Abstract

Industrial and old lab robotic equipment can be upgraded and reused in very sophisticated applications such as robot arms if provided with an efficient modular program or framework such as ROS (Robotics Operating system). In this paper, we replace the old control system of the 5-DOF robot arm (complete Gryphon Package 35-002-c) with the help of ROS MoveIt Motion Planning Framework package to control motion planning and generate joints angles, URDF (Unified Robot Description format) used to create the robot model for ROS. The microcontroller is used to move the five stepping motors to move the end effector in the desired pose: position and orientation using ROS and MoveIt capability. Thus, the robot should be upgradeable, and anyone who has ROS basic skills can improve the arm functionality to use it in any desired application