About the project

Today robotic arms are widely used in industries for material handling, manufacturing operations like welding, drilling etc. Not just in industries, robotic arm finds use in prosthetics, complicated surgeries(still in development) and other medical fields. People around the globe are trying to replicate the human arm, which led to the development of a bionic arm that helped physically challenged people to do their daily tasks. These developments of the robotic arms first came into the industry by the company called Unimation.

Unimation was founded in 1956 by George Devol to build the robots. The company manufactured the first industrial robot Unimate in the year 1962. General Motors used the robot in the same year. Later number of robotic arms were developed and manufactured including Stanford arm, SCARA, PUMA, Sawyers robot arm, KUKA robotic arms etc. These robots have to perform tasks like pick and place the objects from one point of the location to the other. The other tasks include welding, drilling, inspection, material handling, painting etc. In industries, the accuracy of the task performing robots matters a lot. These tasks are carried with greater care. Therefore, sophisticated machines, precision tooling, force control grasping, feedback systems and computers were developed.

Robotic arms have a variety of structures like gantry type, cylindrical, spherical and articulated. And they are powered by electric, pneumatic and hydraulic mainly. These have closed-loop systems, that are able to get feedback through sensors like rotary encoders, tactile sensors, motion capturing cameras, etc. For most of the scenarios, these robots have to perform the same routine tasks. So, these robots are set to follow a trajectory that involves grasping the job or welding the routine automobile frame or drilling the same workpiece. But, handling such tasks also includes accuracy and precision of the work, safety, repeatability, adaptability and human-robot collaboration. Such qualities of the work need sophisticated machine components, better feedback systems, complex algorithms, fast reaction time, etc. Today’s technology and development in such methods made it possible to achieve the accuracy and precision of the work, safety, etc.

Meanwhile, these robotic arms are provided with the additional degree of freedom by attaching it to a mobile robot. This expands the usage of the robotic arm from a stationary platform to a mobile platform. Where it can move around the shop floor and can do all manipulation tasks. This kind of work is already implemented by many big tech companies like KUKA, Universal robots, etc. These mobile robots are of greater help, it reduces human labour in material handling, visual inspection and other manipulation tasks.

The present project RALS – Robot Articulated Links Servo System, is a robotic arm fixed to a stationary platform that can do a simple manipulation tasks like pick and place the objects with adaptive grasping gripper. This robotic arm is equipped with good trajectory planning algorithms that ensure the robot to follow a smooth trajectory.