Development of an Arduino Controlled Robotic Arm

Abstract

This report contains the development of an Arduino controlled robotic arm having a five Degree of Freedom (5-DoF). The robotic arm is intended for pick and place operation which is to be used for instructional and educational purposes. In designing the robot arm, servomotors were used to power the various joints of the robot arm. The research covers the procedure for selection of the servos used to power each joint of the arm in details. Aluminum was selected to fabricate the components of the robotic arm. The torque exerted at each of the joints was calculated and a servo with the required torque rating was selected for each joint. The Arduino UNO R3 board was selected for the project and the Arduino IDE software was used for the control of the robotic arm. For controlling each movement of the joint we implemented the use of Bluetooth module and an Android device. Satisfactory results were obtained from the project.  From the result, it was discovered that the Robot arm picked and placed an object with the parameters: Mass = 60grams, Diameter = 60mm, Height = 80mm. The distance between the initial position and the final position is 300mm.