A microcontroller-based 3-axis manipulator applied to a printed-circuit-board driller system

This paper presents the design and construction of a 3-axis manipulator. The paper shows the application of the manipulator to a printed-circuit-board driller system. The manipulator uses direct current motors with permanent magnets. The design of the manipulator is based on microcontrollers to control the speed and position of the motors by using full bridge DC-DC converters with a pulse-width-modulation technique. The designed manipulator includes a personal computer (PC) that works as a user interface to load the file with the numeric control format for the driller. From this information, the PC generates the required position and speed commands for each servomechanism. The paper describes in detail the software and hardware designed to measure and control the speed and the position of each servomechanism.