Design and Development of an Educational 5-DoF Robotic Arm

The effective training of engineering students require hands-on experience in what they would later work with in the industry. The trend in manufacturing nowadays is towards robotics and automation. Relevant to this technology is the robotic hand. This paper outlines the design and the development of a 5-DoF (Degree of Freedom) robotic arm. The robotic arm is intended for educational purposes. The design proposed the use of servos to power the joints and to implement the inverse kinematics of the robotic arm. A simulation of the robotic arm was achieved by using the Matlab Robotics Toolbox, to visualise the joint movements. A suitable servo controller was selected for the implementation and a control software for the robotic arm was developed using Microsoft's C# programming language. The software allows the robotic arm gripper to be postioned in space, by specifying the coordinates of its centre position. Polymethyl methacrylate was selected to fabricate the components of the robotic arm. The robotic arm was tested by specifying various coordinates for the gripper with reference to the robot's base and measuring the corresponding coordinates of the centre position of the gripper, which gave satisfactory results.