This paper focused on the development of low grade robotic arm for small industries who cannot afford heavy duty and expensive arm made by most companies. Most small factories in regions like Africa are in desperate need of a device to handle repetitive tasks but they cannot meet up with the purchase and maintenance cost of companies like KUKA, Fanuc, etc. so they rely on human labour which is inaccurate and causes body pain for the workers. In this work, a 5 degree of freedom robotic arm was developed to solve this problem. The link of the robotic arm was 3d printed using poly lactic acid filaments and the ATmega328P AVR microcontroller was used to control the arm, four metal gear servo was used to actuate the arm while one servo was used for the end effector. The critical load for the arm was established after running the stress analysis for each of the links. And forward and inverse kinematic equations was developed to track the position and rotation of the end effector in 3D space. The arm can work in two modes, sentry and user mode. A hard switch was provided to switch from one mode to the other. Sentry mode was designed for repetitive tasks. User mode allows a controller to operate the arm using a joystick to control the joints. Software stress analysis was done using Autodesk inventor and physical evaluations were conducted and the arm performed as expected.

Keywords : Robotic Arm, Industrial Robot, Robotics, Forward Kinematics, Inverse Kinematics, Automation.