servoarm – Simple Robot Arm

I have wanted to build a robot arm for some time now. I recently started by printing a 3D planetary gear. It worked OK, but was not fantastic. I soon realised that I could spend quite a lot of time just designing and building a joint that I liked, and never really get to a functioning robot. Also, there is a lot of people on the internet designing and testing 3D printed joints. I hope to be able to leverage that work in the future. So I took a step back, and decided to get a better grasp on the overall design and software required to build an arm. 

I have started by getting a cheap servo based robot arm. This should help me learn ROS, and better understand how the required inverse-kinematics could be implemented and how the overall operation of the robot could work. I understand the significant limitations of a servo based arm, but I think it might be a good place to start and learn.

The more sophisticated design can come later.