Design and Development of a Robotic Arm for an Assistive Robot using ROS

In this paper, we present the design and development of a 6-degree-of-freedom robot arm intended for an assistive robot, aimed at providing support to elderly and handicapped individuals by assisting with tasks such as grabbing and serving. We began by establishing clear functional requirements for the assistive robot arm, ensuring cost-effectiveness and easy upgradability. The arm system is controlled using the Robot Operating System (ROS). Through this study, we devised simulation arm trajectories and real-time applications, specifically pick and place tasks. Building upon these applications, we successfully created a functional prototype of the assistive robot arm, incorporating revolute joint mechanisms that resemble the flexibility of a human arm. Experiments were conducted, focusing on assistive tasks, indicating that the robot software can be integrate and become extremely useful to improve the grabbing/serving tasks or any other applications of robot arm system.