Design and development of a system to control the HERO 2000 robot from a PC

This thesis describes the design and development of a system to control a robot from a PC. This project uses the HERO 2000 Robot and its remote control unit in the Link Mode. The movements of the robot are controlled from a PC using a serial communication program written in C. This program could be used to program the robot's motions. The existing system uses the remote control unit to control the movements of the robot. The remote control unit has a few specified keys which correspond to certain built-in functions of the robot. The serial communication program used in this system provides additional keys which correspond to more built-in functions of the robot. This feature provides flexibility in programming the robot's motions. The robot can execute the pre-programmed motions with the touch of a key on the PC keyboard. A Motorola 68HC11-based microcontroller system was also developed to provide controls to two auxiliary stepper motors. This added feature could be used for further developments of the robot such as building a video camera based monitoring system for the robot. In this case the two stepper motors could be mounted on the robot and used to position a video camera.