A Custom Robotic ARM in CoppeliaSim

Purpose: For robotics research, we require the robot to test our functions, Logics, algorithms, tasks, etc. Generally, we do not experiment with the practical robot.  The primary issue is Practical robots are costly. The individual researcher usually cannot afford it. The second one is, the test with the real robot is risky and can damage property, human life, and itself due to bugs in the program or abnormal activity. So, it is best practice to experiment in Simulator first. When the algorithm is finalized, it can be implemented into a real robot. A researcher who starts the Robotics research, the learning curve is too long to develop a workable robot in Simulator. This paper demonstrates how we can easily create a 7 Degree of Freedom (DOF) custom robot for our research purpose. We will use the CoppeliaSim robot simulator for this purpose. It is free, opensource, and entirely GUI-based. We can create a robot without writing any code using this software.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Here we describe to develop a custom robot. At first, we created a DH parameter for our robot. Then following the step-by-step procedure, the robot is created. After creating, we can attach our code on any object using LUA script language. To control the robot from external world, we can connect through TCP/IP socket communication. Establishing the communication, our robot will move depending on processed algorithm.

Findings/Result: The robotic arm researcher needs robotics arm to test their forward kinematics, Inverse kinematics, statics, dynamics etc. code. Here we design our custom robots for research purpose.

Originality/Value: Using CoppeliaSim, we can design custom robot for our research.

Paper Type: Simulation based Research