A Novel Design of a Full Length Prosthetic Robotic Arm for the Disabled

This paper shows the design methodology of a humanoid robotic arm with realistic mechanical structure and performance. Realistic and mechanically robust structure for a prosthetic arm was developed in Solid Works. The torque, power requirements and cost estimation were assessed systematically by interfacing the model with SimMechanics software. The robotic arm is equipped with several robot servo motors which perform as links between arms and perform arm movements by interfacing with a robot servo controller and the PIC16F886 microcontroller. The robot servo controller has the capability to drive the servo in controlled position, speed, and acceleration modes. Due to the complexity of the arm kinematics, machine-learning techniques, which rely less on precise mathematical analysis, are implemented. ANFIS is one such machine-learning technique which helps in decision-making and control of robotic arms. This paper implements a MATLAB-derived multilayered ANFIS controller using a PIC16F886 microcontroller as a supervisory control for a 6 DOF robotic arm. This type of robotic arm has many advantages such as simple structure, high flexibility, low energy consumption, quiet operation, and sensory feedback which make it a prosthetic arm with very high resemblance to a normal arm. A good tradeoff between cost and performance is achieved in order to meet the goal of less expensive and useful robotic arm for the disabled. The practically built arm is tested with predefined paths and random positional targets with in work space and results are shown to act satisfactorily.