Fully automatic warehouse solution

This instructable will show you how to use two PhantomX Pincher Robot Arm and one PhantomX Reactor Robot Arm as a warehouse sorting system including Lego Mindstorm EV3 Educational Sets.

The project consists of a warehouse solution, built in a small scale. A Lego truck will drive alongside a black line on a table, by means of a color sensor in the bottom. It will deliver a pallet to the storage. The Lego truck will drive back to start position after delivering the pallet and activate a switch, to send a ready message to PhantomX Pincher Robot2. The storage will turn and place the pallet on a storage rack, using coordinates. The storage will turn back to initial position and activate a button, to send a start signal to PhantomX Reactor Robot1.

PhantomX Reactor Robot1 then takes the pallet from the storage rack and delivers it in-air to PhantomX Pincher Robot2. PhantomX Pincher Robot2 grabs the pallet after receiving a ready signal from PhantomX Reactor Robot1 and sends a signal back to PhantomX Reactor Robot1 that it has the pallet. Robot2 places the pallet on the truck and send a signal to PhantomX Pincher Robot3, which then presses start on the truck. The process will continue running until stopped.

Step 1: Equipment

2 pcs PhantomX Pincher Robot Arm Kit

Buy: Buy the PhantomX Pincher Robot Arm:

Assembly: Assembly guide for PhantomX Pincher Robot Arm

Software: Software and getting started Arduino IDE

1 pcs PhantomX Reactor Robot Arm Kit

Buy: Buy the PhantomX Reactor Robot Arm

Assembly: Assembly guide for PhantomX Reactor Robot Arm

Software: Software and getting started Arduino IDE

Step 2: Digital Input

Two pushbuttons have been used in this setup, one for starting the reactor robot (Robot1) where the other one is for starting the pincher robot (Robot2)

The pushbuttons are three wired and they are connected to an digital input.

Information can be found here:

Setting up pins

Reading from pins

Step 3: I2C Bus Communication

I2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit)

This bus is a 2 wired bus system to communicated and transfer data between devices.

This bus system is developed on 2 wire with a 5 volt supply. It has a pull-up resistor of 1.8KΩ and is connected to pin 16 and 17 on the ArbotiX M Robocontroller board.

Information can be found here:

Master Reader/Slave Sender

Master Writer/Slave Receiver

Step 4: Including Libraries

As a part of communicating over I2C, certain actions are necessary.

To get the I2C up and running is it necessary to include the “Wire.h” library, this library gives the program function to request, receive and transmit data between the devices on the network.

All programming can be found in zip files in the following step.