I’m drawing up a design for a robot I’m going to begin building in the coming weeks but I’m having trouble deciding how to raise/lower the arm/tower on my robot. The arm/tower will bend halfway up and at the top will have a hand (or gripper) and some type of vision system (multiple types of vision). I wish I had a picture to post, but I’ve been unable to locate one online and the only picture of my robot is in my head. I’m choosing to go with linear actuators because of the weight
My question is, what type of linear actuator is the best for a robot? The arm will have up to four linear actuators. I’ve read at one point that electric linear actuators can require a lot of amps, but I’m not so sure pneumatic or hydraulic would be a better choice. I’m leaning towards electric linear actuators because the actuators would be the only thing which would use the pneumatics or hydraulics, but I figured I would ask prior to purchasing.
Also, what would be the best way to drive the actuators? Should I use a dual motor controller, relays, or another way?
With no specific design details of what you have in mind, I’d just suggest actuators that work the best. You might consider linear actuators that have internal pots for position feedback.
Use Google Sketchup to sketch the arm to scale. You’ll need an idea of how much weight you plan to have it lift, the dimensions of each section and where you plan to attach the actuators. Once you have all of that information, you’ll need to do a torque balance to find the forces required in a worst case situation (for example the arm stretched to full length while holding the maximum load.
Ya know, I Google Sketchup never came to mind. I’ve been fighting with AutoCAD to get it to turn out correctly. Sketchup is soo much easier to work with. Thank ya for that!
