Design and Development of Motion Control for a Metal Waste Cleaning-24 Robot Using ESP32 and PID Control

This study presents the first low-cost ESP32-based metal waste removal robot specifically designed for small to medium-sized industries. The Metal Waste Cleaning-24 robot is developed using an ESP32 microcontroller with Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) control tuned using the Ziegler–Nichols method and validated through Routh–Hurwitz stability analysis. The system integrates an ultrasonic sensor, a drive motor, and a servo motor powered by a 12 V battery with a sampling time of 10 ms. A mathematical model of a DC motor with a transfer function of is implemented for precise motion control. Structural analysis using ANSYS simulation with aluminum alloy 319.0 shows that the maximum von Mises stress is well below the material's tensile strength limit, with 97% correlation (r=0.9847) between simulation and experimental validation. This robot is capable of processing metal waste with a weight of 50-500 g and a density of 2.0-8.0 g/cm³, achieving a peak efficiency of 167 g/min. In contrast to commercial systems valued at USD 2.75 billion, our solution costs USD 25-50, bridging a crucial research gap by providing quantitative PID controller performance data for metal waste manipulators in a real industrial environment that were previously unavailable in the literature.