Wooden Robotic Arm

I love this project for three reasons.  As a Mechanical Engineer, I see this as a masterpiece.  As a woodworker, I can fully respect the work that it took to make this arm, and as a guy who really loves articulated robotic (mechanical) arms, this is simply the tops.

Nice Arm!

This video will amaze you and creep you out at the same time.



Gizmodo says "It’s the Robot Hand H-Type, which is made of polycarbonate and rubber. It has 16 joints and 22 actuators to make and can lift up to 1.5kg."

Nice.

Rooster

I was checking over my fresh copy of the Lego Education catalog I got in the mail yesterday and I noticed a couple of pretty cool robotic arms. Normally, I just glance over them mainly because they are super expensive and why buy one when I could build one. The big one called Brutus is $3500 and pretty detailed and would be fun to play with, but more fun to build.

Then I noticed the smaller one called Rooster. Rooster isn’t really a robotic arm, but an R/C arm. I took a glance at it and it looks like it can be fairly easily made using five PF motors; two driving motors, one arm lifting motor, one gripper tilting motor and one gripper motor. You could really get lots of bang for the buck. And of course, you could throw a NXT and some servos and some sensors in it to make it programmable.

I think that a PF project like this has some serious “playability.” Imagine chasing the kids and the cat around the house with something like that? I might even let my four year old play with it. This guy is certainly going into my “Will Build” project list.