iPhone-powered robotic arm system for object manipulation

Abstract:

Traditional vision-based robotic arm systems are mostly used in industry, and they are usually cumbersome, heavy, nonportable, and expensive. Although they are precise, efficient, and powerful, they cannot be used in a domestic environment or on mobile platforms. Therefore, lightweight robotic arm prototypes were proposed, but the vision kit of these systems consists of one or multi-cameras and a laptop or an onboard PC which impairs portability and domestic usability. In this work, we propose to build a vision-based robotic arm system with a smartphone, which is low-cost, light, portable, and suitable for domestic use. It consists of a desktop robotic arm—Mirobot, and an iPhone which is the controller of the whole system: 1) it detects and locates the target object using its cameras; 2) it connects to Mirobot via Bluetooth; 3) it generates G-code to move Mirobot to grasp the target. The proposed system utilizes a single iPhone to control a lightweight robotic arm, and as far as we know, it could be the first iPhone-powered robotic arm system.