Development of a 4-DOF SCARA robot with 3R1P for pick-and-place tasks

The planar robot is very suitable for moving workpieces which are in high demand in industrial automation. This paper develops a 4 degree of freedom (4-DOF) selective compliance assembly robot arm (SCARA) robot with three rotary joints and one prismatic joint (3R1P) to realize pick-and-place tasks of the circular and rectangular workpieces. The structure of the robot is firstly presented. The kinematic model is then built, and the kinematic analysis is performed based on MATLAB. The trajectory planning is further implemented. A control interface is also designed via Visual C++ to control the robot for achieving pick-and-place tasks. The validity of the developed robot is finally verified through experimental results.