Reproducible Vision-Guided 6-DoF Robotic Manipulator with a Mixed Stepper-Driver Architecture and Browser-Native Control

Abstract:We present the NeuralNexus Arm, an open, low-cost 6-DOF robotic manipulator built by an undergraduate engineering team, together with the design decisions and debugging experience needed to reproduce it. The arm is driven by a single STM32H743 microcontroller on a custom printed circuit board (PCB) and combines two stepper-driver strategies on one controller: push-pull 3.3 V step/direction outputs for onboard TMC2209 drivers on the three wrist joints, and open-drain outputs for external CL57T and DM542 drivers on the three high-torque proximal joints. We describe the mechanical design, mixed-driver electronics, interrupt-driven firmware, a MATLAB/Simscape-based inverse-kinematics pipeline, a browser-native control interface using the Web Serial API, and a lightweight vision pipeline for object localisation and autonomous pick-and-place tasks. We also document non-obvious hardware and firmware failure modes encountered during the transition from a development board to the custom PCB as reproducibility guidance. All design files and firmware are released openly. The platform actuates all six axes under coordinated control at a 2 kHz update rate and executes both manual and pre-recorded motions from the browser interface.

13 pages, 16 figures, 7 tables. Design files and firmware: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2608.22799 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.22799v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.22799 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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