Virtual and Physical Components to Build Modular Robotic Arms for Effective Understanding of Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) Parameters

Education in the field of robotics has gained importance in recent years. With the help of sophisticated virtual and physical models, the understanding of robot kinematics and dynamics can be improved. These models have various limitations as they are either software based or the reconfigurability of the physical models is limited. To overcome this, the authors have proposed an ideology where various robotic topics such as Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameters, forward kinematics, etc., can be easily understood. A modular methodology to build serial robots using readily available items, proposed elsewhere, has been improvised and reported in this paper. These items can be arranged in various configurations to get the desired architecture of a serial robot. The components can also be disassembled and reassembled into any other desired configuration. Due to the modular nature of this setup, these components can be given to students as a kit, because of which, they will get direct hands-on experience with a robotic manipulator.