Design and Development of Robotic Arm Movements and Body Frame for a Social Robot for Graduation Rites

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought crisis to people from around the world resulting to a transition from face-to-face classes to an online class in the academic sector. Graduation ceremonies also transition into an online ceremony where students passively attend the session. In this study, a Social Robot named “Gradbot” is developed to help the students participate actively in their online ceremonies. The Body frame was designed using Fusion360. The Gradbot is compose of the Arduino microcontroller, servo motors, Bluetooth module, mounted on a 2WD car chassis and was simulated using Tinkercad and MATLAB. This study also includes the investigation of the degrees of freedom, type of joints, workspace, and the cartesian product of the developed Gradbot.