DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THREE-DEGREES-OF-FREEDOM ROBOTIC ARM FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLE CHARGING STATION

The exponential growth of the electric vehicle (EV) industry requires the development of more efficient and easily accessible charging infrastructures. The existing manual charging procedures provide significant difficulties, especially for those with impairments. The objective of this project was to overcome these difficulties by designing and developing a robotic arm that is particularly designed for automating the process of charging electric vehicles. The project aimed to improve operational efficiency and user accessibility by designing a three-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm using CAD software, SOLIDWORKS, and prototyping it using 3D printing technology. The main approaches employed were thorough Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to guarantee the structural integrity to confirm the operational dependability. The primary results indicate that the robotic arm design successfully automates the charging process, resulting in a substantial reduction in the human labor needed from users and an improvement in the accuracy of the charging connection. These results not only showcase the arm's capacity to completely transform EV charging methods but also emphasize its flexibility in different vehicle settings, indicating a wide range of possible uses in automated systems in the future.