Hallros
Hello!
I am a new member and fell in love with this website at first sight, have always been interested in building robots but never really got into it.
I live in Sweden and though i would share my ideas before i throw myself into something im not sure will end well lol
Ok so i will begin with an intelligent robotic arm.
It would work in such a way that its motions adapts after where the "head" wants to go, and by "head" i mean the tip of the arm, wich could be a gripper for example. So if the "head" wants to move up, down, forward or backward, the arm would move all necissary joints to move the head to the position it wants to be at. I think this would result in incredible precision if done well.
Would such an arm be possible for a newbie? I guess the software would be the hard part.
I have been reading some and watched some videos, and i think these functionalities would be easy to set up:
Tracks for movement Camera for vision Speakers
The harder things would be:
Self rechargeable Remote control interface over wifi (the goal is to be able to control it from a remote location, lets say another house, over the internet)
What hardware do you recommend for such a robot? I suppose a embedded pc would be a good base, though i havent seen many videos of one actually being used within a robot.
And ofcourse expandable with additional sensors and so on, but these functions as base
Please reply with your thoughts on this project, or suggestions for improvements!
Best regards, Erik
There is a discussion on our forum about self charging using a roomba as the base. The roomba will locate its docking station apon command. I have been considering using one for my Robie Sr.
Some ppl say "It's too bad the EZ-B requires a computer". I don't think it's too bad at all. I think if you want a computer in your robot, you buy one and combine it with the EZ-B
. It's not very expensive to purchase a netbook or mini-itx computer to include in your robot shell.
If you browse the tutorials on this website, there is a section entitled Embeded PC's. I have a little video about what to look for and how to purchase a mini-itx for embedded computing.
It sounds like your project will be pretty wild! I can't wait to hear more
A humble suggestion, since you are doing a robotic arm project would you really need it to be battery operated? You could just plug an AC to DC power supply to it and off you go. I guess it all depends on what kind of capabilities you'd like you arm to have, indoor or outdoor environment, mobile or fixed, etc. You could always use a Solar panel to keep a Sealed lead Acid battery pack charged up.
As for the part where you wanted the arm to follow the gripper's movements, that shouldn't be too bad to code in ARC, just place a camera near the gripper and use the ControlCommand("Script1", ScriptStart) code to have the bot start a movement script whenever an certain color is detected or a face is recognized. That's just one way of going about it I'm sure there are others. Good luck with the Arm, sounds like a fun project!
Cool! Tyvm for your thoughts
I'll update my progress here over time, whenever i get started with this project