<i>Design and Analysis of Automatic Apple Packing Arm</i>

Abstract

Abstract. To realize automatic apple packaging, a mechanical arm with three degrees of freedom was developed. It is an inverted suspension mechanical arm, and a flat key was used to replace the joint structure of the gear meshing rotation. Thus, this mechanical arm can grasp apples effectively, and can reduce its vertical movement distance. The overall structure of this mechanical arm was designed by applying the 3D designing software, SolidWorks. There are three main works in the design and analysis of the mechanical arm. First, the orthogonal experiment was used to acquire the optimal parameters of the mechanical arm. Second, torque analysis of the lower and upper shafts of the mechanical arm was carried out separately. Third, to verify the rationality of the structure, the simulation analysis tool of SolidWorks was used to conduct the static finite element analysis of each part of the mechanical arm. Testing results show that the mechanical arm can operate safely and can meet the automatic packing needs. This study provides a theoretical basis for the design of the mechanical arm for automatic apple packing.