Design and Fabrication of 3-DOF Robot Arm Using Parallelogram Mechanisms

This paper focuses on the design, fabrication and control of a 3-DOF robot arm using stepper motors. The robot arm uses three parallelogram mechanisms to position the end-effector of the robot and keep the end-effector always parallel to the horizontal during the robot motion. The robot is designed on the Autodesk Inventor software. Separated parts of the robot are saved in the stereolithography (STL) file format. Then the parts are fabricated by a 3D printer. The movement of the robotic arm is driven by stepper motors and controlled by Arduino. The Arduino board implements kinematics calculation, creates pulses and sends them to three drivers to driven stepper motors. A software is developed to control the robot by sending the command to the Arduino board.