In order to meet the needs of online, automatic and intelligent measurement of the articulated arm coordinate measuring machine (AACMM), a self-driven AACMM is proposed and its measurement and control system is studied in this paper. The hardware system uses the computer as the controller, and is built with six driving joints and trigger measurement circuit. The software is designed with the structural framework of state machine and event structure. The motion control and the automatic measurement of sampling points in the planning path of the self-driven AACMM are realized. The test results show that the measuring machine runs smoothly with the support of the measurement and control system, and the self-driven AACMM can achieve a repeatability of 0. 038 mm for the small size ball and 0. 192 mm ( k = 2) for the larger size gauge block. The study on the measurement and control system in this paper lays a foundation for the calibration technology, error analysis and application research of the self-actuated articular arm coordinate measuring machine. .