Sexy Six Axis Robotic Arm Is A Work Of Art

We don’t know if it’s a mid-life crisis or just the result of way too many solder fumes, but [sparten11] on Instructables is building one of the coolest robotic arm we’ve ever seen, and we thank him for that.

The build began with a set of brushed DC motors running capable of running on 60 volts at up to 8 amps. These motors were attached rotary encoders that, with the gearing [sparten11] is using, provide 400,000 steps per revolution.Combined with a heavy duty motor controller, [sparten]’s arm has more than enough power and control for just about any industrial process.

Of course muscles are useless without a skeleton or brain, so [sparten] milled the structural and mechanical members of his arm in his home machine shop. It’s an impressive bit of kit; the base of his robot tested the capacity of his lathe, and the waterjet-cut arms form a graceful skeleton of an absurdly powerful robotic arm. The electronics for the build consist of a Pico PC running Windows XP with servo control board etched from a copper clad board.

The build isn’t quite done yet, but judging from the videos after the break, [sparten] will have a fabulous robotic arm shuffling around his workshop in short order.

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Creating A Voice Controlled Robotic Arm

robotic_arm_voice_control

[Arthur] was laid up with a wrist injury, so he decided it would be a great time to hang out around the house and tinker with electronics, since most outdoor activities were out of the question. He picked up a robotic arm kit and assembled it to test out some code written for it that he found online. Since typing commands into a terminal was awfully cumbersome considering his injury, he figured he might as well construct a voice control system for the arm.

He documents his work in a three part series, covering the process from concept to completion. The first part centers around the creation of the vocabulary and grammar for the voice recognition system, along with the how the grammar model was trained using voice samples.

The second and third portions of his tutorial deal with the software’s decoding of his commands and the Python scripts used to translate those commands into something the robotic arm can process.

[Arthur’s] voice control system works pretty well as you can see in the video below, though he already has a wish list full of improvements he hopes to make in the near future.

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