Sarrus Linkage Aerial Drone Arm

The final goal of this project is to design an advanced robotic sampling mechanism that can be deployed by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to obtain small objects. The focus of this part of the research is only on designing the lightweight, foldable robotic arm for this system. The arm will be designed to utilize Sarrus linkages to efficiently retract and extend. This arm has one degree of freedom and the motion in this arm can be controlled by torsional springs and one actuator. In the final design, the arm, initially, will be in the retracted position, which will allow it to be stored in a streamlined case to minimize interference with the objects in the path of the drone as it flies. Once the drone has reached the desired location, the arm will extend to its full length to reach the target object. In this paper, a foldable arm has been completely analyzed, designed in SolidWorks, and a prototype of it was built and successfully tested. In the next stage of this project, a novel gripper would be designed for this mechanism.