Development of a Domestic 4-axis SCARA Robot

Abstract

The global manufacturing industry has been demanding a steady increase in active industrial robots worldwide for years. The fields and technological tasks in which industrial robots are applied are rapidly expanding with a constant demand for improvement of their functions, technical characteristics as well as control and programming systems. One of the goals of the current research in the Laboratory for Robotics & AI is development of a domestic industrial robot with the possibility of automated programming based on information obtained from the camera. The paper presents the first part of the research developing a 4-axis SCARA industrial robot with the control system integrated camera. Professor Hiroshi Makino from Yamanashi University designed SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm), and this robot is the most famous robot configuration originated at the universities. This part of the research includes the design of the mechanical structure, preliminary CAD/CAM testing, development of control and programming systems, virtual robot simulation, and robot production that were parts of two Master theses done in 2022. The realization of the robot control system starts from a well-known SCARA robot kinematic model. The open architecture control system realized in the LinuxCNC software allows the possibility of further development and full camera integration. The control system includes the integrated virtual robot model configured using several predefined Python classes and OpenGL as a digital shadow of the developed SCARA robot. Several successfully done examples of technological tasks of laser engraving have shown the verification of the complete robotic system.