hi, this is Sian…i m currently a final year student…i m doing my final year project now and my projet title is robotic arm path planning…i am using my PC to control the robotic arm…but i am facing problem now…
does anyone know where can buy a ready made 3 axis robotic arm?..since my robotic knowledge is limited,so i hope all the freinds here can give my a hand…my supervisor suggest me to use visual basic to do the programming,is it difficult?..i am still learning the robotic arm,so i am suffer in doing the project…i wanna ask how to design the interface circuit?..does anyone know it?pls…and is it RS232 necessary for my project?thank you
Below are the arm products sold by Linxmotion. There are other arms sold by other makers available on the net. There is software that can be bought to control the arms, or you could probably use something as simple as batch files made with notepad to control the arms. How much of the project are you expected to develop yourself and how much $$$ do you have to spend on the project? I think an interesting project would be to make a very simple pick and place arm out of easily available materials and develop very simple programming to control it. This project could be duplicated later by school kids that don’t have much $$$ as an introduction to robotics.
As zoom pointed out, the ease of getting a working robotic arm is entirely dependant upon how much $$$ you have to spend and how much your supervisor will allow you to “cheat” (i.e. buy programs/electronics instead of making them yourself).
So, here’s the best case scenario:
In the easiest case, you’re allowed to buy and use anything, and you have a reasonably high budget:
Then you could get a Lynx arm kit, a SSC-32 servo controller, a wall transformer, and RIOS (the arm software).
RIOS will lead you through Inverse Kinematics, which are very helpful when positioning an arm.
As for writing a Visual Basic program for an arm, so long as you’re using the SSC-32 servo controller, it should be a piece of cake.
All you’d need to do in your program is send string literals out a serial COM port to the SSC-32.
You could do fancier things, such as implimenting IK within your program.
It’s all up to you and your project’s guidelines how difficult this will be.
You might try something like this:
lynxmotion.com/images/video/l603.mpg
It should be fairly simple if you do what NickReiser was talking about with buying all of the parts. I too have looked around for robotic arms. Most of the arms that I saw, were either cheap immitations of Lynxmotion’s arms or overpriced arms. In my opinion, Lynxmotion is the best place to get your arm. I got one, and it takes almost no time to put it together. Another thought would be to use the “little gripper” with the “servo erector” system and make a VERY simple arm.
Because you wanted to know, I did happen to find a pre-made arm, but it is a little over kill and definately overpriced (this is what I was talking about with overpriced arms):
crustcrawler.com/products/arm5.php?prod=0