Design and development of an open-source articulated robot manipulator for education-based industrial applications

Articulated robotic manipulators with 6 degrees of freedom are commonly used in industry and their importance is growing since they are capable of replacing human effort in many areas. Yet, the theoretical background and the practical use of this technology don't come together as often since many academics prefer to work on the theoretical frame while many companies prefer to carry commissioning tasks of the robots manufactured by a very limited number of high-tech companies who present their robots as a closed-architecture. This situation dramatically slows down the progress of making the essence of this technology more accessible to wider communities. In order to contribute to making this technology more accessible to anyone professionally interested in robotics; this study focused on the development process of a 6-DoF robotic manipulator from the preliminary design phase to the fully-functioning prototype phase including inverse kinematic analysis, simulation development, etc. As an extra study to validate the results, the customization of an actual industrial robotic manipulator KUKA KR5 which didn't have any electronic components provided by the manufacturer has been accomplished. A similar solution to the originally designed robotic arm has been obtained for this model as well and implemented on the actual KUKA robot. In the end, the KUKA KR5 robot has been controlled based on the theoretical solution obtained within the scope of this study and the custom electronic components mounted on the mechanical body. So, the actual industrial robotic arm ran totally independently from the manufacturer's control software and electronic hardware.