BYOE: Design and development of simple robotic arm

Abstract

In today's world there is an increasing need to create artificial arms where human interaction is difficult or impossible. In this paper we describe the implementation of a simple robotic arm capable of moving and lift some objects. The development of this arm is based on the Arduino UNO. The servos act as joints of the robotic arm which are controlled by corresponding potentiometer. We have used low torque servos here due to budget constraint and proof of concept; however more powerful servos can be integrated to pick heavy object. This particular robotic arm was designed with four degrees of freedom and programmed to accurately accomplish simple and light material lifting task as in the production line in any industry. However, it can be used as pharmacy-based drug-giving robots; in the medical sector and in automation systems. The generation of the human-like manipulation motions has been implemented and also tested successfully for the 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) arm of the humanoid robot. The presented approach does not consider the dynamics of the robot arm. This would be necessary to generate realistic velocity distribution for the manipulation motions. The implemented prototype has the ability to move in 4 axis directions with 4 servo motors. The voltage across variable resistors is not completely linear rather a noisy one. Capacitors are used across each resistor to filter out this noise, as shown in figure 1. This voltage represents the control position and is fed into four ADC channels of Arduino to get corresponding digital values. The Arduino UNO ADC has a resolution of 10 bit, means it maps input voltages between 0 and 5V into digital values between 0 and 1023; in other words, 4.9mV per unit. This project is very helpful for beginners who want to make a robotic arm with low cost.