Design of a voice control 6DoF grasping robotic arm based on ultrasonic sensor, computer vision and Alexa voice assistance

The article presents a study to design a 6-degree of freedom robotic arm which can pick up objects in random positions on a 2D surface based on Arduino microcontroller, ultrasonic sensors and picamera. The robotic arm is able to recognise objects based on computer vision algorithm for shape detection. The ultrasonic sensor measures the distance between the objects and the robotic arm, and the position of the objects in the real world will be detected by its mass centre in the image to improve the accuracy of the pick-up movement. Arduino microcontroller will calculate the rotation angles for the joints of the robotic arm by using inverse kinematics algorithms. The movement of the robotic arm also can be controlled by an Amazon Alexa voice assistance device. The experiment of applying the artificial neural network to control the robotic arm pick-up movement is achieved. The artificial neural network can manipulate the position of the robotic arm to pick up objects after training using the values which are calculated by inverse kinematics equations. The Raspberry Pi is used for processing the computer vision data, and voice commands from Alexa Voice Service based on cloud service.