Design and Development of a Competitive Low-Cost Robot Arm with Four Degrees of Freedom

Ashraf Elfasakhany, Eduardo Yanez, Karen Baylon, Ricardo Salgado

.

DOI: 10.4236/mme.2011.12007                

Abstract

The main focus of this work was to design, develop and implementation of competitively robot arm with en- hanced control and stumpy cost. The robot arm was designed with four degrees of freedom and talented to accomplish accurately simple tasks, such as light material handling, which will be integrated into a mobile platform that serves as an assistant for industrial workforce. The robot arm is equipped with several servo motors which do links between arms and perform arm movements. The servo motors include encoder so that no controller was implemented. To control the robot we used Labview, which performs inverse kinematic calculations and communicates the proper angles serially to a microcontroller that drives the servo motors with the capability of modifying position, speed and acceleration. Testing and validation of the robot arm was carried out and results shows that it work properly.

Keywords

Robot Arm, Low-Cost, Design, Validation, Four Degrees of Freedom, Servo Motors, Arduino Robot Control, Labview Robot Control

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1]	Manipulating Industrial Robots—Vocabulary, Interna- tional Organization for Standardization Standard 8373, 1994.
[2]	Industrial and Service Robots, IFR International Federa- tion of Robotics, 2010. http://www.ifr.org/home
[3]	Case Studies and Profitability of Robot Investment, The IFR Statistical Department, 2008. http://www.ifrstat.org/downloads/2008_Pressinfo_english.pdf
[4]	R. J. Wang, J. W. Zhang, et al., “The Multiple-Function Intelligent Robotic Arms,” FUZZ-IEEE Journal, Korea, 20-24 August 2009, pp. 1995-2000.
[5]	L. B. Duc, M. Syaifuddin, et al., “Designing 8 Degrees of Freedom Humanoid Robotic Arm,” International Confer- ence on Intelligent and Advanced Systems, Kuala Lumpur 25-28 November 2007, pp. 1069-1074.
[6]	C. R. Carignan, G. G. Gefke and B. J. Roberts, “Intro to Space Mission Design: Space Robotics,” Seminar of Space Robotics, University of Maryland, Baltimore, 26 March 2002.
[7]	Occupational Safety and Health Administration Technical Manual, OSHA 3167, United States Department of Labor, 1970.
[8]	B. Siciliano, L. Sciavicco, L. Villani and G. Oriolo, “Robotics, Modelling, Planning and Control,” Springer, London, 2009.
[9]	M. P. Groover and M. Weiss, “Robotica Industrial, Tech- nologia, Programacion y Aplicaciones,” Mc-Graw Hills, Mexico D.F., 1989.