Open Loop Automated Baby Cradle Using Dobot Magician and C#

Abstract

Purpose: We are all busy, especially those responsible for family expenditure. We have lots of pressure in our workspace. Some employees are still doing work from home. Family being converted into an office as well. The problem arises when our small kids cry during a scheduled meeting. Sometimes need someone who can swing the baby’s cradle. Here we demonstrated an automated baby cradle which is useful when our baby cries. We can put our kids into the robotic cradle and engage in other work. When the baby cries, we trigger the run button from our working PC/Laptop, and the cradle starts to swing automatically. Here we used Dobot Magician for this purpose, a famous robot in the education and research sector due to its cost-effectiveness. To drive the robot, we developed an application in C#. It is a small program that is used to swing the cradle. Here we move the robot by the program. So we can change the program quickly, so our sweetheart feels more comfortable inside the cradle. The entire project source code is available on Github. Anyone downloading the project can integrate, test, and continue further improvement.

Design/Methodology/Approach: In our research, we used the Dobot magician robot to swing the cradle. One support-like stick is connected between the robot and the cradle to push the cradle. The robot is driven by the program written inside the programming area. The original API is a little bit programming specific. So we provided intermediate programming space to write code as our understandable language. The complete application is developed using the C# language under Microsoft visual studio 2022. We used the vendor-provided dynamic link library to send the command to the robot to reduce development time.

Findings/Result: We can integrate the Dobot magician robot into our custom project after developing the complete system. The movement pattern can be changed by changing the program, which may be used for different task execution utilizing the robot. The IDE can also be used for other robots, like UARM metal, a 3D printer, etc. Under the code, any robot can be operated using this interface. It has a programming interface, as well as a command-line interface. We can test, debug and experiment as well.

Originality/Value: We created our application in C#, a modern, easy and flexible language. The IDE has lots of scope for experiments. The program has very easy to understand. We use the robot to swing the cradle for flexibility in nature. We can change the swings pattern by changing the parameter value, which is impossible in fixed monotonous movement. This can give us a unique feature than most other available procedures to swing the cradle.

Paper Type: Experimental-based Research.