The robotic arm

We've split up into two subteams: the CS team and the EE/ME team.  The CS team will be working on finding out how to run the Kinect and programming it so we can extract the necessary data.  The EE/ME team wanted to take on the daunting task of building a robotic manipulator from scratch.  I had done something like that before in my undergrad days, and was looking forward to designing one again.

We were given an OWI robotic arm like this.

This robot is driven completely by dc motors.  The controller in the picture operates the motors at a single speed bidirectionally.  There is no position control or velocity control whatsoever.

This further convinced us to build our own robotic arm out of servo motors for their ease of position control.  Luckily, Haofang found a robotic arm from his work in the Mod Lab assembled from a kit from http://www.lynxmotion.com/c-27-robotic-arms.aspx.  This saved us a lot of designing time, but we still needed to build a gripper.


I ended up designing a gripper that could be easily built from laser cut ABS and a servo motor which is based on a gripper design by an old MIT colleague by the name of Carrick Detweiler.  It looks something like this.


Here's the finished product.