I’m starting a research project and I’m designing a table with robot arms to use as a medium for the project. I would like to have two types of arms on the table, one would be a very maneuverable arm that would be used to pick up, move, and manipulate items. The other would be a “Crab eye” arm, which would be an arm with a camera instead of a gripper. Currently I’m trying to get one arm up and running. These are pictures of the arm I have built currently.
The arm uses a trigrip hand with two LPA’s, the servos are HSR-5995TG except for the ones that operate the fingers, those are HS-5475HB. The counter balance system on there was put together after everything else and is temporary, and built with the parts I hand on hand. I need to get a more stable system, unless the servos will be able to handle the heavy trigrip hand when I provide adequate power to them.
The crab eye will have a camera in place of the gripper and I will omit the LPAs and counterbalance and possible extend the length of the arm.
My first objective will be to build two arms, and one crab eye and have this set up as a unit to experiment with.
The second final project will have 3 Agents on each side of a table. Each agent will have 2 arms, and 2 crab eyes.
I need to come up with a system to power all these arms, which eventually will be 90 servos. I’m thinking of either beefing up the SCC to handle more current or using servo power boards to minimize the number of SCC-32 boards that I will need to use.
I’m not extremely knowledgeable about servos or mechanics and I want to design a stable system, that is robust and will last a long time. Thanks for any suggestions you might have in any aspect of this project design.
That pretty much eliminates the “hobby” grade equipment. Like the old engineering saying “good, fast, cheap…, chose any two.” I’d look at using only one servo to operate the tri-finger grip, and that would be thru a push-pull cable arrangement to get a lot of weight off the arm. As to power, you could use 6v auto type lead/acid batterys constantly topped off with a large auto battery charger. For heavy current, no real reason for running any of the servo power thru the ssc-32 in such a setup. Make a seperate power bus. If you use the ssc-32 as the servo controller, then you will need to use three of them, each operating on a seperate com port (assuming the arms are controlled from a computer).
Is there a lynxmotion product that has the push-pull cable arrangement or would I have to look elsewhere for one? I was thinking of just getting a power supply that could plug into the wall. I would like to stay away from batteries that would need to be replaced, I would prefer something that could just be plugged in and always work.
Would you suggest the servo power board to setup the power bus? Also, if the servos are rated at 5.2 A max current, how much should I supply to the whole 10 servo arm? I don’t want to damage the servos
I don’t think lynxmotion carries any cable components. You might look at something like below, or other brake/throttle bike type cables. If you don’t want a DIY power supply, you electronic suppliers (but they can be $$$)
So I don’t know much about batteries, but from looking for a high current power supply they seem pretty hard to come by. Whats the highest current I could get out of a battery like the one you were describing? I suppose I could just keep using more and more till I get the current I need. How much current do you think I should design the systems to have, about how much per servo would be appropriate? When you say constantly topped off with a charger, does that mean I could charge them at the same time as using them?
