Category: robots

The PlatypusBot is a TurtleBot3-inspired robot built from vacuum cleaner parts

We all love the immense convenience provided by robot vacuum cleaners, but what happens when they get too old to function? Rather than throwing it away, Milos Rasic from element14 Presents wanted to extract the often-expensive components and repurpose them into an entirely new robot, inspired by the TurtleBot3: the PlatypusBot. Rasic quickly got to […]

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We all love the immense convenience provided by robot vacuum cleaners, but what happens when they get too old to function? Rather than throwing it away, Milos Rasic from element14 Presents wanted to extract the often-expensive components and repurpose them into an entirely new robot, inspired by the TurtleBot3: the PlatypusBot.

Rasic quickly got to work by disassembling the bot into its drive motors, pump, and several other small parts. Luckily, the main drive motors already had integrated encoders which made it very easy to connect them to an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi and an L298N motor driver for precise positional data/control. Further improving the granularity, Rasic added a 360-degree lidar module and enough space for a Raspberry Pi in order to run SLAM algorithms in the future.

For now, this 3D-printed robot assembled from reclaimed robot parts is controlled via a joystick over UDP and Wi-Fi. The host PC converts the joystick’s locations into a vector for the motors to follow, after which the values are sent to the UNO R4 WiFi for processing.

For more details on this project, you can read Rasic’s element14 blog post. 

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Build your own 4DOF robotic arm on a budget

Robot arms are very cool and can be quite useful, but they also tend to be expensive. That isn’t just markup either, because the components themselves are pricey. However, you can save a lot of money if you make some sacrifices and build everything yourself. In that case, you can follow Ruben Sanchez’s tutorial to […]

The post Build your own 4DOF robotic arm on a budget appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Robot arms are very cool and can be quite useful, but they also tend to be expensive. That isn’t just markup either, because the components themselves are pricey. However, you can save a lot of money if you make some sacrifices and build everything yourself. In that case, you can follow Ruben Sanchez’s tutorial to create your own four degrees of freedom robot arm from scratch.

This design has four actuated axes: the base, the shoulder, the elbow, and the wrist. Depending on the end effector you need, a gripper might count as another. It has a reach of up to 80cm and a maximum payload capacity of 350g, which is enough to move small objects.

Sanchez reduced the cost of this robot arm (compared to typical designs) in two ways. The first is by constructing the frame from aluminum sheet cut by hand, with laser markings as a guide template. The second is by using DC gear motors with external encoders for actuation, rather than purpose-built robotic actuators. They won’t have as much accuracy or repeatability, but they’re affordable.

An Arduino Due board controls the motors through Pololu drivers. The Arduino receives movement commands from a connected PC, which can look at the work area through an Intel RealSense camera attached by the end effector.

Sanchez provides the Arduino Sketch to get started, but encourages users to develop their own control software. To help with that, his writeup includes some nice explanations of inverse kinematics, the math involved, and how to implement it.

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