SYSTEMATIC DESIGN OF A DESKTOP ROBOT ARM IN SOLIDWORKS AND MATLAB SIMULINK

Abstract

Robot arms are complex mechatronic systems whose design is a challenging and time-consuming task. Recently, low-cost small-size desktop robot arms have been increasingly used in education, research, households, etc. This paper presents the systematic design of a 6DoF desktop robot arm with cylindrical joints actuated with stepper motors. Within the design, the main goals were to achieve cost-effectiveness of the construction, to enable the simplicity of the control unit, and to achieve fast dynamics and good repeatability. The virtual simulation system of the manipulator, built using the integration of 3D design and modern multibody simulation environment, improves the robot design and the efficiency of the robot control system. 3D modeling of the robot arm is performed in SolidWorks. The location of each motor as well as the selection of the power transmission method achieve a reduction of the required moments in the joints during the robot movement. Verifying of motors’ dimensioning is performed using numerical simulation of robot inverse dynamics problem based on the SolidWorks 3D robot model for the desired robot operations within the Simulink environment by using Simscape Multibody.