“In this tutorial we will learn how to build an Arduino based SCARA Robot. I will show you the entire process of building it, starting from designing robot to developing our own Graphics User Interface for controlling it.
Overview
The robot has 4 degrees of freedom and it’s driven by 4 NEMA 17 stepper motors. Additionally, it has a small servo motor for controlling the end effector or the robot gripper in this case. The brain of this SCARA robot is an Arduino UNO board which is paired with a CNC shield and four A4988 stepper drivers for controlling the motors.
Using the Processing development environment, I made a Graphic User Interface which features both Forward and Inverse Kinematics control. With the Forward Kinematics we can manually move each robot joint in order to get the desired position. Using the sliders on the left side, we can set the angle of each joint. The final position of the end effector, the X, Y and Z values are calculated and printed on the right side of the screen.
On the other hand, using Inverse Kinematics we can set the desired position of the end effector, and the program will automatically calculate the angles for each joint in order the robot to get to that desired position.”