ROBOT ARM

The Robot Arm was built by my friend, Eliot, and I for the National Science Olympiad Competition. We spent about 6 months designing, building, testing, and redesigning the whole arm to prepare for Nationals. The overall goal of the arm was to pick up stacks of 10 pennies in various locations around the arm and then place them in a bulls-eye orientation on the ground in front of the arm (note that the pennies also had to be flipped over). This turned out to be no small task...

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The arm features 7 Robotis servo motors, 2 stepper motors, an Arduino (with a self wired interface board that Eliot made), and several potentiometers and buttons to control the arm. We created a master-slave control system for the arm where the potentiometers where connected by 3D printed pieces to create a miniature arm so when the mini arm moved, then the actual arm mirrored its movement (shown in the video below).

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The claw itself is designed to move both sides of the claw in a linear path using only one servo motor which after several cycles of redesigning was finally possible.