Spider Arm: Design and fabrication of a cost-effective six-axis robotic arm featuring a novel double-ring load transfer mechanism

This paper is part of an ongoing study at the labs of Spider R&D (The official research and development club of the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli). This paper presents a 6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) robotic arm being built at our labs for research on pick-and-place movements, teleoperation, and integration with large language models (LLMs). The arm being built is 70 cm in length and has a payload capacity of 0.5 kg. This arm features a novel double-ring load transfer mechanism at the base to ensure that none of the arm’s load is exerted on the base motor vertically. Other joints of the arm are driven by low to high-torque belt drives. The end goal of this arm is for its integration with LLMs as planners for household tasks.