Design and Development of an Anthropomorphic Robotic Arm for Object Grasping with its Kinematic Analysis

The applications and requirements of a complete robotic arm from shoulder to fingers are obvious for hand disabled people. The reported research toward hardware development and its operations of a complete robotic arm is limited and needs to accelerate for the betterment of society. However, it is a very challenging task to design and develop a human-like five-fingered robotic arm due to more number of degrees of freedom required to provide the sufficient flexibility. It is also challenging to ensure precise autonomous motion of the full arm to following the reference trajectory in order to approach and grasp the object. In this paper, we present the detailed description of the design and development of a 20-DOF (3-DOF shoulder, 1-DOF elbow, 1-DOF wrist, 3-DOF thumb and 3-DOF each finger) robotic arm. The main objectives are to develop a human-mimic robotic arm having higher degrees of freedom, competitive physical capabilities and able to perform precise motion while approaching and grasping an object. The presented robotic arm is designed in SolidWorks and implemented using ROS library. The mathematical analysis of its kinematics is also provided to design the control system and motion planning algorithms as per the requirement. A novel motion planning and control algorithm is also introduced to govern the motion of the full arm and perform accurate grasping. The performance of the developed robotic arm is compared with the existing arms on the basis of accuracy in motion while approaching and grasping an object. It has been observed that the physical strength of the developed arm is quite competitive, while it outperforms others in motion accuracy. Results have been verified by the hardware experiments and further validated by the statistical technique.