You’ll find robotic arm kits on Amazon for as little as $35, however they’re actually simply toys. In case you improve that price range by about 20 instances, yow will discover robotic arms which are able to performing some helpful (however light-duty) work. Then if you happen to improve that price range by one other 20 instances, you get into the “actual” industrial robotic arm territory. These beefy boys, like what KUKA provides, are huge, costly, and able to doing severe work. Redditor RoboDIYer needed one, however couldn’t justify that. So, they constructed this tiny KUKA robotic arm that’s completely cute.
KUKA is headquartered in Germany and makes very spectacular robots, like what you’d see in a high-tech issue welding flux capacitors or one thing. They’re the sorts of robots that we people may by no means justify buying for our foolish little hobbies. However RoboDIYer was so impressed by the smooth design of KUKA LBR iisy cobots that they designed and constructed their very own model, scaled down for interest use.
This robotic arm may be very small and solely has MG90S servo motors to rotate the joints, so it isn’t going to elevate something heavy and gained’t transfer light-weight issues very far. It additionally doesn’t have any sensors, so it gained’t do something “good.” But it surely does have 4 levels of freedom and a gripper, plus a strong MATLAB management interface. These make the little man able to probably performing some helpful work, akin to shifting blocks from one stack to a different — a job each roboticist is aware of is in excessive demand.
Except fasteners, RoboDIYer 3D-modeled each a part of this robotic arm in Autodesk Fusion 360 after which 3D-printed it. That even contains the gripper. The servo motors function underneath the management of an ESP32 improvement board that attaches to a customized PCB to deal with the connections.
Except for the good design, which appears to be like very fairly, probably the most spectacular a part of this undertaking is the management app that RoboDIYer inbuilt MATLAB to run on his PC. It has sliders for adjusting the place of every of the joints and gripper, together with the flexibility to save lots of these positions and run by means of them in sequence. It even features a 3D visualization that mirrors the motion of the robotic arm in actual life, which is one thing we not often see for DIY builds like this.
Better of all, the design information are out there for obtain if you wish to construct your personal mini KUKA LBR robotic arm. It could not have the immense energy and heft of the true deal, however it is going to be much more inexpensive.
