Design and novel control solution for a modular mechatronic demonstrator with video feedback used in research and education

This paper deals with design solutions for a modular mechatronic demonstrator with video feedback used in research and education. The Demonstrator allows the testing of control algorithms on various mechanical structures with multiple degrees of freedom (DOF). Although simple in mechanical design, our setup offers a large number of possibilities both in research and education. It is our aim, with this demonstrator to test model based and also model free control strategies comparable to human behavior. For this paper we will construct a 2 DOF arm as the mechanical structure to be controlled. Our hypothesis is that a human does not require knowledge on its arm kinematics in order to perform tasks, thus we present in this paper an approach on determining the arm configuration to reach a target point without knowing the arm's elements lengths.