Kinematics Analysis and Simulation of A 5DOF Articulated Robotic Arm Applied to Heavy Products Harvesting

Abstract

Robotics can play a significant role to increase efficiency and lighten the farmer's load. Despite challenges in the agricultural robotic designs, robots are capable of performing various tasks and changing themselves accordingly, based on specific conditions. To address modern problems in the agricultural field, an agricultural robot is one of the key technologies. Although agricultural robotic is still in the development stage, robots have a bright future ahead. This paper proposes a new 5DOF articulated robotic arm design that would become a solution for heavy crop harvestings like pumpkin and cabbage. After the development stage, this robotic arm will be mounted on a robot tractor for real experimentation.The main design process of this robotic arm was conceived using 6 stages of Shigley design process. All components were designed, assembled and analyzed by using Solidworks 2014 in compliance with Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) standards. The parts of the system that had dynamic nature were analyzed manually using standard mechanical formulas. Calculations of the workspace required joint torque, and coordination of mass center position was done by using standard machine design methods. Denavit-Hartenberg method was used to calculate forward and inverse kinematics. To resolve the torque reduction, components were designed using different materials and mass centers and comparing their performance.Results showed that total torque in Joints number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were 6.15, 257.35, 103.4, 20.2 and 0.1 respectively with a rotational speed range of 15 ~ 60 rpm. Changes in the linkage material and servo motor location improved 29.7% ~ 47.7% and 29.7% ~ 68.9% of the total required torque for each joint. The maximum distance covered by the arm was 1421 mm from the and 2026 mm from the attachment point. According to the feedback received from a inverse kinematics equation algorithm, the fundamental operation of the robot arm had an optimal performance.

Design and performance of a robotic arm for farm use

“…Agricultural robots usually consist of three parts: a mobile platform, actuating system, and recognizing system. Figure 1b, shows the system developed for this study, consisting of a robot tractor as the mobile platform (developed at the laboratory of Vehicle Robotics of Hokkaido University), the RAVeBots-1 as actuating system for grasping, lifting, cutting, and crop transferring [48] , and a control unit.…”

“…AL5052 is one of the light alloys of aluminum, with good weldability by gas, arc, and resistance [48]. Figure 2b contains a detailed illustration of the RAVeBots-1 components, including the developed robotic arm, a PC for programming and controlling with a position board, amplifiers, brake unit, and an emergency switch.…”

“…In the design of the controlling algorithm for the RAVeBots-1, the Denevit-Hartenberg method (D-H) was used to find the optimized algorithm [48] . The D-H method was chosen because it has a minimum delay and highest accuracy in experiments, and more versatility properties in terms of real-world conditions.…”

Kinematics Analysis of 5 DOF Robotic Arm

“…The results indicated the small error between the results extracted from RoboCIM software and the results from the MATLAB software. Roshanianfard and Noguchi [8] investigated a new robotic arm with 5 DOF work to harvestings of heavy crops, and Solid works software was used to design and analysis the robotic arm. D-H method was used to solve the forward and inverse kinematics.…”

Kinematic Analysis and Simulation of an Orange Harvesting Robot

“…Youki also solved the inverse kinematics for a 6 DOF robotic arm for path planning of apples using algebraic method (Yuki Onishi, 2019). Ali suggested 5 DOF kinematic analysis for crop harvesting like pumpkin and cabbage using geometric method for inverse kinematics (Roshanianfard, 2018). S. Parvathi (Parvathi, 2017) designed a 4 DOF robotic arm using inverse kinematic geometric calculations.…”