Design and simulation of a robotic arm for manufacturing operations in the railcar industry

Abstract As part of the application of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR) to manufacturing activities, robotic solutions are integrated into the cyber physical systems and the production systems to enhance the automation of the manufacturing processes. This will further enhance high productivity with reduced manufacturing cycle time and overall cost. This work discusses the modelling and simulation of a robotic arm for manufacturing operations in the railcar industry. The Computer Aided Design (CAD) and the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) were carried out using the Solidworks 2017 under different loading conditions. The results of the finite element analysis showed the robotic arm is unlikely to yield or fail under different loading conditions as examined using the Von Mises failure analysis criterion. The negligible magnitude of the strain and displacement distributions imply that the robotic arm will be able to perform the gripping, handling and assembly operations with high degree of precision and accuracy during the manufacturing processes. Furthermore, using the inverse kinematics model in the MATLAB 2018 b environment, the kinematic motion and trajectory of the robotic arm along the X-Y coordinates show the movement of the robotic arm along a well-defined path, which indicates that the arm is highly flexible, characterized by smooth motion along the predetermined path during the manufacturing operations. Hence, this will promote the development of products with high quality in an efficient and fast process.