Robot Arm Provides Haptic Feedback From The Virtual World

May 31, 2012 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

[Diego] wrote in to let us know about the haptic feedback arm project with which he’s hard at work. He calls it the Vimphin, which is uses the beginning letters from the words: Virtual Manipulator Physical Interface. Instead of a claw, the robot arm has a hand grip that lets you easily move it around. That is unless the virtual model of the arm encounters a dense substance, and then it’s going to be more difficult to move.

The test arm seen above includes several high quality robotic servo motors. You probably know that servo motors have feedback circuits that let them sense their position, and this is what is used to detect when a user moves the arm. This movement is tracked in the virtual 3D environment seen on the screen. In this case, the base of the robot is sitting in a pool of water. When the end of the virtual arm is in open air it’s pretty easy to move. When it dips below the water line the motors are used to increase resistance, simulating movement through a denser substance.

This sounds like a great piece of hardware to have around when the OASIS is finally developed.

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TI Launchpad Adds Computer Control To A Robot Arm

November 21, 2011 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Eric Gregori] had an OWI535 toy robotic arm. Although cheap (coming it at around $30) the arm is only set up to be used via a wired control box. [Eric] knew he could do better by adding computer control via a TI Launchpad and motor driver peripheral.

The arm has shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints, a rotating base, and a gripper. All of these are actuated by 3V DC motors and have just two control wires. [Eric’s] motor driver add-on for the Launchpad works great in this case. It’s got three FAN8200 dual motor driver chips on board so it can control up to six motors. Once he made the hardware connections it’s just a matter of sending the commands to the Launchpad via its USB interface, but you will also need to use a larger microcontroller than comes with the Launchpad. Here he’s chosen an MSP430G2553.

In order to make things a little bit more fun he also wrote a GUI for controlling the arm from the computer. He used RobotSee, a programming language that lets you use an image of the hardware, and overlay the controls on top of it. Now he just needs to make this into a web interface and he can have a smartphone controlled crane game.

Don’t forget to check out the video after the break. Continue reading “TI Launchpad Adds Computer Control To A Robot Arm” →

Strap Yourself In And Let This Robot Arm Shake The Bejesus Out Of You

November 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

This man is strapped onto the business end of a huge robotic arm. If you’ve seen videos of industrial robots on automobile assembly lines and the like, you know how fast and strong these machines are. But this isn’t headed for the factory floor, it’s a new flight simulator built do train Australian fighter pilots.

Researchers at Deakin University were looking for a way to give a fighter pilot a more realistic simulator experience. What they ended up with is an apparatus that can spin continuously on two axes. This lets the pilot feel what it might be like to stall and have the aircraft spinning out of control.

The video after the break is not to be missed. You’ll see the test pilot (read: guinea pig) flung this way and that to the point that we almost decided this should be a “Real or Fake” post. But we’re confident that this actually exists. We expect that future renditions will include the front portion of the aircraft and be completely enclosed in a projection dome, just like the Lexus driving simulator.

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Modifying A Cheap Robot Arm For Arduino Control

June 15, 2011 by Gerrit Coetzee 12 Comments

Many a hacker has put together one of those cheap $30 robot arm kits you can get in just about any store with a section labeled, “science”. In an ongoing search for a cheap robot arm, [Larry] decided to modify one of them to be controlled with a PC through an Arduino. The article doubles as a really basic tutorial on dc motor control. On the site he gives a brief explanation of how to use H-bridges and a good explanation of how he wired them up for this purpose. He eventually goes on to add a processing interface to the project. The next step would be figuring out how to add some kind of position feedback, such as encoders. Though, if modifying an arm is not your style, [Larry] has another cool article on rolling your own robot arm cheaply with some foam board and hobby servos.

Trobot: Kickstarting The 6-axis Minature Robot Arm

June 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Having already made it to three hardware development versions, [Toby Baumgartner] is looking for some financial backing to make version four of this robot arm possible.

He’s modelling the arm after much larger ABB industrial robots. Like those, it mounts on a stationary base, and features movement along six axes. The first couple of iterations even used ABB Software’s RobotStudio for control. This is the same software used by the full-sized robots, and features a special design language to integrate the robots into just about any production facility.

We don’t think the need for high-end software used with these small manipulator arms is very great, but we could see the finished product used for small-scale assembly line work some day. In the mean time these might be useful in your own projects. [Toby] has been using an mBed microcontroller board as the hardware driver. It communicates with the computer via an Ethernet connection and he’s even working on an Android interface right now.

Check out a video demonstration of version 2 and 3 embedded after the break.

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Kids Type With Their Eyes, Robot Arm Prints Their Words

December 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

F.A.T. took it to the next level, combining a couple of their projects for the Cinekid festival. This contraption lets kids write their names with their eyes for printing by a robot arm. The first part is a glasses-free version of the EyeWriter, originally developed as an assistive technology. The system uses some IR LEDs to generate a reflection on your eye that a PS3 camera can pick up and use to precisely track your gaze. Just look at each key on a virtual keyboard to spell out your message. From there, a robot arm used previously in the Robotagger project prints out the name on a big sheet of paper the kids can take home. This is cool, but more importantly it’s a great way to inspire the next generation of hackers and engineers. Check out the video after the break.

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Mini Robotic Arm Lets You Start Your Own Mini Assembly Line

October 24, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 25 Comments

Automating tasks with a robot sounds appealing, but not everyone has the budget for an Aismo or Kuka. [FABRI Creator] has a great tutorial on how to build your own mini robotic arm for small, repeatable tasks.

Walking us through the entire build, step-by-step, [FABRI Creator] shows us how to populate the custom-designed PCB and where to put every servo motor and potentiometer to bring the creation to life. This seems like a great project to start with if you haven’t branched out into motion systems before since it’s a useful build without anything too complicated to trip up the beginner.

Beyond the usual ability to use the arm to perform tasks, this particular device uses an Arduino Nano to allow you to record a set of positions as you move the arm and to replay it over and over. The video shows the arm putting rings on a stand, but we can think of all kinds of small tasks that it could accomplish for us, letting us get back to writing or hacking.

If controlling a robot arm with potentiometers sounds familiar, maybe you remember this robot arm with an arm-shaped controller.

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