Eventually, on 2014, I had the opportunity to take a Master's level elective Robotics class. Being such a fan of DIY, it is hard to admit that the drier, maths-heavy parts of robotics (e.g. the kinematics, the dynamics) are hardly the sort of thing that you would teach yourself over an internet tutorial (possible, but unlikely). The class's lectures covered the theoretical aspects that hobbyists would rather avoid, but it also involved the ambitious team project of building a six degree-of-freedom robot arm that would autonomously perform an architecture-related task. While us engineers would see the construction of the robot, architecture students would come up with the specific task for the robot to perform.
I have to say that this was my favorite subject of my whole Master's degree, due to the abundant (and much wanted) tinkering it involved.
The robot we built performed quite well in comparison to the rest of the class. It was built using inexpensive Adafruit analog feedback servos , a servo shield (that we burned and eventually did without) and an Arduino Due. Our team 3D printed the body, while other teams opted for laser-cut acrylic or wood. For the interface, I originally developed a Python GUI using tkinter, just to make one all over again in Processing, because it was the programming language that the architecture kids were familiar with.
The amount of debugging necessary to get something like this running for the first time was, needless to say, colossal. And that is exactly why it was such a powerful learning experience.
The project originally involved using a Microsoft Kinect to provide visual feedback so a central computer could coordinate two arms (from different teams, with completely different architectures) to build a biologically inspired structure.
Our 6 DOF robot arm on its calibration grid.
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