Designing the label giving Robot Arm in the packing box

Abstract

An advantage of applying robotic technology in industry is an ability of robot to perform a similar task automatically and repeatedly. However, for small and medium industries the use of robotic systems is usually considered as a high cost spending. To address this problem, this research is designed to build a robot arm to give a label in the packaging products in small and medium category industries to help the packaging process. The proposed robot arm system is controlled using Arduino Uno microcontroller. The robot arm consists of 4 parts, namely Rail, link 1, link 2 and link 3 that relate directly to the end-effector which is a rubber stamp. There is a work area of robot where the rubber stamp is pressed. The work area is positioned in front of the base of robot arm with a distance of 20.5 cm. The servo motor is moved in the degree unit according to the inverse and forward kinematics computation while the DC motor is moved in the centimeter unit based on the delay value given. Three tests are conducted. From the first test, it is found that average of the servo motor angle error is 3.96%. In the second test, the value of delay that is given to run the DC motor is successfully tested so that robot arm can move horizontally in the rail with the distance as planned. An average of delay for right to left and left to right movement to reach 10 cm is in the range between 263 to 398 ms. In the third test, accuracy of the end effector position is tested. From the test, the servo motor with 55% or 100% maximum speed and the DC motor of 9V is the best configuration if the time needed for the robot arm to finish 1 cycle of task and the percentage of error are considered. This research is designed to build a robot arm to give a label in the packaging products in small and medium category industries to help the packaging process. The 3x3 different work areas in the surface of the package is intended to differentiate a sign about the contents of the box so that a label is placed on the different location in the surface as a work area of the robot arm.