Six Degree of Freedom Robotic Arm with Mimicking Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and prototype of a 6 DOF robotic arm with a mimicking mechanism, controlled by a micro-controller, suitable for industrial pick-and-place tasks, emphasizing the effectiveness of servo motors over pneumatics and hydraulics.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel 6 DOF robotic arm prototype utilizing servo motors for movement, demonstrating improved performance over pneumatic and hydraulic systems.

Findings

Servo motors provided minimal lag and smooth movement.

The robotic arm successfully performed pick-and-place tasks.

Servo-based design outperformed pneumatic and hydraulic concepts.

Abstract

Multi-degree of freedom robots are playing very important role in different applications of automation. They are providing much more accuracy in carrying out a typical procedure as compared to the manual work done by human. In recent years the design, fabrication and development of robotic arms have been active research areas in robotics all around the world. This project describe a mechanical system, design concept and prototype implementation of a 6 DOF robotic arm, which should perform industrial task such as pick and place of fragile objects operation. This robot arm being controlled by micro-controller has base, shoulder, elbow, wrist rotation and a functional gripper. Gripper has been built as end-effector and is capable of grasping diverse objects within own workspace of the arm possible. I made an effort to endeavour one of the best model possible out of the three concepts tried. The three concepts that I undertook were dependent on the type of mechanism used to provide the movement. The first concept was to provide the movement with the help of Pneumatics. The idea of pneumatics did provide a feasible movement but I had to overcome the barrier of the weight as the weight of either the storage of gas or the air compressor would have affected the usage evidently. Similarly, in the second concept, I dealt with the forces of Hydraulics. The forces exerted by hydraulics, not only restricted the movement, but also annexed a certain amount of delay in the time period in which the movement had to be done. In, the third concept, I tried to provide the necessary movement with the help of Servo Motors. The results achieved with servo motors in replacement of pneumatics and hydraulics were impeccable. The motors not only provided the movement with minimal lag but also did not impede the movement of the hand.