ARP is used to find a MAC (layer-2) address, if you know the IP (layer-3) address.First, a device will search its ARP cache, to see whether it already happens to have the required address.
If it doesn't find the address, it will send an ARP request as a broadcast, which basically asks "Who has such-and-such an IP address?"
The machine that has the requested IP address will send an ARP reply.