Modeling and Simulation of 5 DOF educational robot arm

Many universities and institutes experience difficulty in training people to work with expensive equipments. A common problem faced by educational institutions concerns the limited availability of expensive robotics equipments, with which students in the didactic program can work, in order to acquire valuable "hands on" experience. Therefore, the Robot Simulation Software (RSS) nowadays is paramount important. This paper presents the development of a visual software package where a AL5B Robot arm has been taken as a case study. It utilizes Matlab/Simulink and AutoCAD as the tools for testing motional characteristics of the AL5B Robot arm. A robot model will be developed; the Forward, Inverse Kinematics, Velocity Kinematics "Jacobian" and Path Planning problems will be implemented and tested. The developed package will be used as an educational tool. We think that this work will increase the education, training, research and development possibilities for robotics classes in graduate and under graduate studies.