Selfmade 5 DOF Manipulator

Let's Make Robots Robots
1

Hello world!

This is my very first robotic project. I made a 5 degrees of freedom manipulator arm completely from scratch. First thing i want to say is that this guy with his project was my inspiration for doing this: https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/18504. To be honest (and as everyone can see ;) i copied much from his design. Thank you very much for your great work! And i'm very sad we can't buy the supermodified boards anymore, because my plan was to use them for my robot ):

I documented the whole building process because i really miss more detailed information on some other robot projects (including the above one) and maybe others are interested in more details too, so i will provide as much as i can. I also share my models, plans and complete sourcecode for the microcontroller and control application. You are free to use, change or do whatever you want with it. Ok so lets start with some information about the project: Nearly all parts of the robot are made out of polystyrene sheets (0.5 - 2mm). It is moved by 6 servos connected to a Pololu Micro Serial Servo Controller (hidden inside the arm) and controlled by an Arduino Uno rev.3, which is used for the main logic and connection to the control software (written in java). There are 2 FSR-400 in the gripper for measuring the pressure and to avoid stressing the gripper servos too much.

I first designed the whole thing in Google Sketchup. I like this software because its so easy to use and good for quick results. Then i sketched the parts with a pencil on polystyrene sheets and cut them out with a cutter knife. I used little files and sanding paper to make the parts look nice. And at the end they got glued together with special polystyrene glue.

The circuit is built like an arduino shield on a breadboard that can stack on top of the arduino board.

 

More details, sources and what is planned comes soon...

 

UPDATE 23.05.12:

By request, i uploaded the complete sourcecode of the control application (eclipse java project), arduino sketch and my google sketchup model. Because i stopped to work on this project right after my first post here, the code is still highly experimental, incomplete and i'm not even sure everything works in its current state (; I'm sorry there's no stable release. Please note that you need the modified version of arduinos SoftwareSerial library (because of a bug in the original one) to get arduino to work with the pololu micro serial servo controller. I named my modified version SoftwareSerialPololu and uploaded it under arduino-1.0/libraries/SoftwareSerialPololu, thats the path you have to put it under your arduino installation before you can use my code.

I hope it's helpful for someone anyway! Feel free to use and modify it as you like.

Here's the link: https://code.google.com/p/robotic-arm-control/

Maybe i will work on this project again next winter... (;

 

But for now, pictures say more than a thousand words (;

And here are plenty of them:

 

                                                        
  • Actuators / output devices: 2x HS-805BB 1/4 scale, 1x Graupner C4421 Std, 1x Graupner C512 Std, 2x HS-56HB Micro
  • Control method: control software on pc with serial connection to arduino, Pololu Micro Serial Servo Controller for Servos
  • CPU: arduino - atmega328, Pololu Micro Serial Servo Controller
  • Operating system: Linux, Windows
  • Programming language: Java, Arduino
  • Sensors / input devices: 2x FSR 400 (force sensitive resistors)
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/selfmade-5-dof-manipulator
2

Nice project!

Nice project! I liked specially the way you make the parts. Great!

3

Nice, I was thinking of

Nice, I was thinking of making a robot arm using plasticard (aka styrene). What did you use/how did you manago to cut it so nicely? 

4

Nice and clean

Very neat project, great work !

5

Hi TobyM!I just sketched the

Hi TobyM!

I just sketched the parts on the styrene sheets and scarified them on one side with a sharp cutter (blades should be changed after a while, needed about 3 for the whole project) and a steel ruler. You can see the tools i used on the fourth picture. After that i could easily break out the parts by bending the sheets along the cuttings. If they do not break clean it’s easy to finish them with the cutter and some files or sanding paper. If you scarify the sheets on both sides the result is even better but that costs too much time and work for me (only for inner cuttings i did so). 0.5-1.5mm sheets can also be cut out with scissors easily. This was the first time i used this method and material and i’m really impressed how easy it is and how good it works. I love it because i can build nearly all parts i can imagine with it so fast and easy. You should really give it a try!

I hope i used the right words because my english is not the best and some words are from translation websites (scarify sounds just scary to me :wink:

6

Hi,Thanks for the reply! I

Hi,

Thanks for the reply! I tried your method and it works really well. It really does seem like a good way of building things, I think I’ll be ordering myself some large sheets of it!

Thanks for the fast reply, your English is good - although I think the word score is better than scarify!

7

Good job here.

I’m very interested in your software, would you share it? It all looks very nice!

8

thank you!

and yes, i wanted to share the code anyway. Unfortunately i stopped working on this project so the software is not yet finished but only experimental. I hope it helps anyway. Please see the description text of my project, i added an update with some information and the link to the code.

9

waa it looks

waa it looks professional!!great work =)

10

How did you

How did you connect the servo controller to the arduino

11

very very awesome arm. IK

very very awesome arm. IK control would be awesome.

The word for this context is ‘score’.  Score along the lines and then ‘snap’!

Scarify understandable but would refer more to something that is scored but not snapped.  A scar refers to a healed wound that has left a mark.

12

THANKS!!!

wow thank u so much for the new pics of progress!!=D

13

**wow grate job **

is there any  measurements cause this is to much of a good design to pass up on cause to be honest you must a trick up your sleeve to pull that off with out much info and much respect to you 

14

Great project
You had a great project in there. Can you show me the drawing of this robot?

15

thanks! the whole 3d model
thanks! the whole 3d model can be found in the .zip file at https://code.google.com/p/robotic-arm-control/downloads/list