Lightweight Robotic Arm for Flexible Manufacturing.

Lightweight and stable robotic arms are essential devices in flexible manufacturing. The paper introduces a scalable robotic arm with 5 degrees of freedom controlled either by mouse or joystick and powered by serial bus servos and discusses its stability, kinematic characteristics and hardware and software implementation. The authors emphasize the benefit of 3D computer design in the mechanical development of scalable robotic arms. Such approach allows a quick and precise evaluation of distances between the joints with direct consequences in kinematic evaluations, interchangeability of bus servos required in scalability and overall an optimized design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]