The Design and Building of a Robot with Five Degrees of Freedom

Automation engineering is interdisciplinary in its nature. One of the best ways for students to experience this interplay among different disciplines is by building a robot. However, the complexity of robotics puts the designing of a robot, from scratch, far beyond most students' capabilities. It is also impractical to expect the students to complete this type of a project alone. Hence, we delimit the students' project to one of producing a prototype design in collaboration with faculty, and we let the students concentrate on manufacturing and assembling all the necessary parts to build the robot. The objective of this paper is to present the many attributes of the robot we had to consider during the robot's design, including. the type of material used, the location and type of the joint bearings, the electronic circuits, the control schemes, etc.