Designing 8 degrees of freedom humanoid robotic arm

This study presents the processes undertaken in the design and development of an intelligent 8 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) Humanoid Robotic Arm using specified-made parts. The robotic arm imitates a human arm and able to grasp many objects of different shapes and sizes ranging from a small pen to a large ball. The robotic arm consists of a shoulder, an elbow, a wrist and five fingers and each finger is designed with three moveable sections except only two for the thumb. The sections in each finger will either be pushed or pulled synchronously using internal linkages and controlled by a 18F4431 microcontroller. Basic movement is pre-programmed to ensure that all the movement is within the allowable constrains, and can be controlled by human operator or automatically controlled by a computer. The 8 DOFs humanoid robotic arm provides wide trajectory coverage over the three-dimensional space around the base. The specified trajectory of each finger, wrist and arm are bio-inspired and carefully designed to resemble the human's arm movement. ©2007 IEEE.