Robotic Arm Sports Industrial Design, 3D-Printed Cycloidal Gears

August 14, 2020 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

[Petar Crnjak]’s Faze4 is a open source robotic arm with 3D printable parts, inspired in part by the design of industrial robot arms. In particular, [Petar] aimed to hide wiring and cables inside the arm as much as possible, and the results look great! Just watch it move in the video below.

Cycloidal gearboxes have been showing up in robotic arm projects more and more, and Faze4 makes good use of them. Why cycloidal gears? They are readily 3D printed and offer low backlash, which makes them attractive for robotic applications. There’s no need to design cycloidal gears from scratch, either. [Petar] found this cycloidal gear generator in OnShape extremely useful when designing Faze4.

The project’s GitHub repository has all the design files, as well as some video demonstrations and a link to assembly documentation for anyone who would like to make their own. Watch Faze4 go through some test movements in the video embedded below.

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Robot Arm Sucks In A Good Way

April 14, 2020 by Al Williams 5 Comments

Building a robot arm is fun, but no longer the challenge it once was. You can find lots of plans and kits, and driving the motors is a solved problem. However, there is always one decision you have to make that can be a challenge: what effector to put on the end of it. If you are [MertArduino] the answer is to put suction at the end. If you need to grab the right things, this could be just the ticket for reliably lifting and letting go. You can see a video of the arm in action, below.

The arm itself is steel with four servo motors and comes in a kit. The video shows the arm making a sandwich under manual control. We suspect he might have put it under Arduino control but there’s no sudo for making sandwiches.

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Don’t DIY This Surgical Robot At Home

January 9, 2020 by Sharon Lin 11 Comments

The LVL1 Hackerspace in Louisville hosted a hackathon for useless and impractical devices a couple of years ago and this makeshift Duh-Vinci Surgical Robot was one of the “successful” results. While it’s not necessarily a project that should ever be used for its intended purpose, its miniature setup is certainly an interesting one.

The project builds on top of the MeArm Open Source Robot and a camera controlled by a Blynk board. Servos are wired into the base of each of the robotic arms for freedom in rotating. A separate microcontroller is used for the motor controllers for the arms and for the camera, partially due to the current draw for the camera power supply. The remote control system runs on an Android tablet and is used to control each of the arms.

The ESP32-Cam supplied video input is configured as a RTSP stream. As for the operation, while the movements are jerky and the range of dexterity limited, the robot is technically able to handle the sharps. Its final setup looks a bit like a deranged game of Hungry Hungry Hippos meets Operation and definitely not something to be making its way to surgical tables anytime soon.

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An Open Assistive Robotic Arm To Help People Feed Themselves

December 12, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 7 Comments

Despite being otherwise capable, not everyone is able to feed themselves. [Julien]’s robot arm project aims to bring this crucial independence back to those people. Assistive devices in this space do exist, but as always they’re prohibitively expensive and the approval process is a nightmare. The development of the arm started by working closely with people who needed it at a local hospital. We note with approval, quite a few cardboard mock-ups to get the size and shape right before more formal work was done in CAD.

The robot arm only has to support a very light payload so its construction can be quite light. A frame of steel rods or plywood is all that’s required. We like how the motion is transferred from stepper motors to the joints of the arm by generously sized timing belts allowing the weight of the arm to remain towards the base. The team behind the project has gotten it to a point, but they’re hoping it will inspire community involvement as they move forward with it.

It’s worth noting, this is not the first assistive eating aid we’ve covered.

Iron Man Puts Yet Another Hacker Up In Arms

November 28, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 9 Comments

When Iron Man movie came out, we’d bet there wasn’t a single hacker that left the theater without daydreaming about having a few robotic lab assistants of their own. But unlike most of them, [Tony-Lin] decided to turn his celluloid dreams into a reality and started work on his robotic arm, Abot.

Abot is built from a combination of 5 mm nylon panels and 3D printed parts. One thing we found particularly interesting about this build is that the motor reductions for the joints are done using stages of pulleys and GT2 belting rather than planetary gear boxes or cycloidal drives. This produces a lightweight and affordable build.

He also designed his own driver boards for each motor using the STM32. They communicate with a CAN bus which uses USB connectors, an interesting choice. Just make sure not to try and charge your phone with it.

We have to admit to a little jealousy that [Tony] is moved himself a bit closer to being Tony Stark than the rest of us are likely to get. We’ll just have to live vicariously through the documentation of his project.

A Handy Way To Cheaply Print A Robotic Arm

August 29, 2019 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

There’s something fascinating about humanoid robotic hands, if only because of how they are such close approximations of our own hands. One could almost picture them with tendons and skin covering them. Sadly, making your own is quite prohibitive because in addition to being complex bits of machinery, making one of these marvels of engineering is usually rather expensive.

[Gray Eldritch]’s Humanoid Robot Arm project seeks to fix both points, by providing a ready to print project. All it takes is about a kilogram of PLA filament, some TPU filament, five MG996r servos (or equivalent), an SG90 servo or similar, an Arduino Uno board and a few other bits and pieces. This should result in a robotic arm with hand as covered in the video of the Mark 3 version that is embedded after the break.

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LEGO-Based Robot Arm With Motion Planning

July 14, 2019 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

Robotic arms have found all manner of applications in industry. Whether its welding cars, painting cars, or installing dashboards in cars, robotic arms can definitely do the job. However, you don’t need to be a major automaker to experiment with the technology. You can build your own, complete with proper motion planning, thanks to Arduino and ROS.

Motion planning is important, as it makes working with the robotic arm much easier. Rather than having to manually specify the rotation of each and every joint for every desired movement, instead mathematics is used to figure everything out. End effectors can be moved, and software will figure out the necessary motions required to achieve the end results. This functionality is baked into Robot Operating System (ROS) and proves useful to this project.

The construction of this particular arm is impressive in its simplicity, too. It has 7 degrees of freedom, which is plenty to play with. The arm is built out of LEGO Technic components, which are attached to the servos with the addition of some 3D printed components. It’s a smart and simple way to integrate the servos into the LEGO world, and we’re surprised we don’t see this more often.

Robotic arms remain an area of active research; there are even efforts to allow them to self-correct in the event of damage. Video after the break.