I started working on a similarly sized arm. I've got a use-case, long time friends with a glass blower. I was thinking of using it to make faceted glass pendants. They've got a faceting machine but it is manually operated.<p>The hard part is repeatability. You need tight tolerances and each joint in the arm adds inaccuracy the further you get from the base. If the base has 1mm of wiggle, the 20cm arm has 4mm wiggle at the end, and the arm beyond it has even more.<p>You also, for faceting purposes, need much finer resolution than an ungeared servo will have. Gearing it is tricky because you want backlash to keep the join tight, but not so much that it has high friction when moving. You don't really want to use a worm gear because they're both slow and overly rigid. So a cycloidal gear is the best bet for the gears in the arm. You also need real servos with some amount of feedback because grabbing at glass is sketchy at best.<p>I was estimating 1-2k build cost, bulk of that is in the gearboxes.
I'm surprised (or perhaps very unaware) that there doesn't seem to exist a company yet that mass produces cheap, high quality, reasonably standardized robot arms. So many things like 3D printers or CNC machines have entered the consumer/amateur level price realm, but this seems to be something still largely unexplored. Seems to have Arduino/Raspberry Pi scale potential, but I haven't heard of a name/ecosystem that popular yet
Why not start with something less ambitious, like low cost robot platform able to follow people and carry stuff around and avoid obstacles. No arms, I am okay using mine to put stuff on and off it.<p>When I had leg injury and used crutches, carrying stuff around suddenly became a problem. There are many people with impaired movement. And even without that, I often misplace things and it could help there.<p>There are plenty of toy robot undercarriages on aliexpress but too small (under 20cm largest dimnsion) to be practical.
I'm surprised that no one point to this :
<a href="https://github.com/peng-zhihui/Dummy-Robot">https://github.com/peng-zhihui/Dummy-Robot</a>
It's probably a bit hard to read though.
Anyone who finds this interesting might also like this one, it‘s not DIY – comes fully assembled:
<a href="https://www.waveshare.com/roarm-m2-s.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.waveshare.com/roarm-m2-s.htm</a><p>I have one and the build quality is really impressive for the price point.
Any idea how much weight this could hold?<p>I’m wanting to manipulate a fan in my home gym with some eye tracking to get it to blow air on my face when I work out, but the fan is a few pounds.<p>Alternatively: any hardware motor suggestions for such a project?
Wow, I was building a Thor 3D printed arm, and this project looks way better! I think I'm going to Pivot.<p>Side bar: these servos are a game changer.
As a longtime Dynamixel user I agree the U2D2 adapter is pricey in comparison to other options, but I would like some quantification of the “latency is very high” claim. I have always found it to be a sure bet for low latency (~1ms) across a wide variety of platforms.
Please stop gluing 3 servos together and claiming you built a robot :D<p>(servos motion is quite jerky, that is why they don't have a video showing off this "robot" operating)
Here's what I want to build:<p>A rotatable, table-top round disc base, with a contraption to keep a mobile phone straight and stable. The stand itself will have 4 small unidirectional mics, to figure out which direction (after filtering for human frequencies, ideally) is the sound coming in. And based on that, it will rotate the phone to face that direction (continuosly).<p>The use case is family video calls that I do frequently from my dining table (my whole family is sitting around the table, hence there is no one good spot to keep the phone). With this self-rotating stand, the phone will auto-rotate towards whoever is speaking.<p>I can write audio-processing code, but I have no idea how to get started with the hardware. Feel free to steal my idea, but please share with me how you are building it. I just want this to exist, and I want to know how to build it for myself as a fun project.
I printed a robotic arm for school. Unfortunately, we weren't using a high quality enough printer, so the tolerances were off and things didn't slot together well. I'd recommend people to know the precision of their printer before setting off to build this.
Anyone know how the accuracy of this compares to the similar-cost adamb314/ServoProject arm? [1] It utilizes a servo mod adding dual encoders to compensate for backlash and achieves accuracy of +/- 0.05mm (enough to thread a mechanical pencil lead in and out of the tip of a pencil). [2] He's been working on the project for 5 years, with significant improvements still in the last year. [3][4]<p><pre><code> [1]: https://github.com/adamb314/ServoProject
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SioCwvR_PYY
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4mrb2T706s
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctb4s6fqnqo</code></pre>
As a level 12 necromancer, I myself am a fan of necrobiotics:
<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202201174" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202201174</a><p>Spiders move not through direct-muscle limb manipulation as we do, but something more akin to hydraulic pressure moving a joint. Thus they become self-building hydraulic soft actuators with a very simple i/o interface(psi in the necrospider)
Im currently waiting on the motors for this, but my bambu p1s printed out the parts with minimal stringing in like 90 mins. Really to try it out for cooking experiments
Bought a Sainsmart robot arm because it was cheap and has 6 degrees of freedom. I don't use it for anything serious though. It was just to practice some robotic programming. <a href="https://github.com/wedesoft/arduino-sainsmart">https://github.com/wedesoft/arduino-sainsmart</a>
Does anyone have any suggestions on something that's a little higher quality, i.e. more torque and larger, like the size of a UR5 but cheaper than $30k? There's always seems to be a gap between "robot arm with dynamixels/off the shelf servos" and "research-grade arms".
I have zero idea what I am going to use this for, but the idea of having a robot arm has fascinated me since I was a kid and I am 100% going to start working on this this weekend.<p>I think I could find some fun projects. I wonder if it could hold my microphone and it turn into an automatic microphone arm...
Impractical, but here are my kitchen use-cases:
- Hold a hot pan and drip bacon grease into a jar
- Hold "almost empty" bottles like olive oil upside down to drain them
- Making dishes that require constant stirring over a long period (tapioca, risotto, etc)
Does anyone have any suggestions on something that can be used to for threading a small needle with a very fine thread?
Would need high accuracy and repeatability.
Higher price would not be a problem.
I've built my own GELLO setup (the setup the author based it's arm on) and it's quite neat, but as I only use it for teleoperation of an real arm, I wonder how useful this low cost arm really is? Considering limited range, probably backlash, and the limited torque<p>Also it doesn't seems to use springs like GELLO which was a nice add, although the 3D printed parts where the spring was mounted broke quickly.
I want the arm to wander around my house, pick up articles of loose clothing and put them into washing machine. Then pull them out and spread them on a drying hanger. How far away from that are we?
A $250 robotic arm is really a price consumers can reach. How does it perform in practical scenarios in terms of durability and precision? Is it functional?
obligatory shout out to Annin Robotics AR4. Here is my build: <a href="https://commandpattern.org/2023/03/19/ar4-robotic-arm-build/" rel="nofollow">https://commandpattern.org/2023/03/19/ar4-robotic-arm-build/</a><p>$2K USD. 2kg payload. millimeter repeatability (if you build it well :)