DIY Robot Arm using 3 Analog RC Servo Motors, USB serial interface and Arduino Uno board
William Lehman
DIY Robot Arm using 3 Analog RC Servo Motors, USB serial interface and Arduino Uno board
We built a low cost low precision arm that works with ROS Joint State Publisher or Moveit. The robot arm uses 3 RC Servo Motors (PWM). The Arduino Uno is used as the robot controller.
The Robot arm can be controlled manually using the Joint State Publisher with GUI enabled. The Robot arm can be moved to the desired position using sliders. The Brazen Joints node converts the joint state message to a Brazenbot Msg and that in turn is sent using ROS serial to the arduino uno board (which is the robot controller).
We also used moveit with the Fake Robot Controller in a similar way to control the robot arm.
The code for Brazen Joints and arduino code are open source.
It took a hour or two to build the 3R robot.
The robot base was made
out of cardboard. Hot glue, velcro and wire ties were used to
connect the parts. We used ½ inch aluminum flat for the links. We
could of used just cardboard for the links. Picture below shows
arduino controller and robot arm.
Screen shot of the ROBOT Model shown in RVIZ below:
The brazen msg can be used to control 12 RC servo motors for your own designs.
I would be happy to help in any way for anyone interested in building there own RC servo motor robot arm.
