3D printed robotic limb

3D printed robotic limb

Author: David Randoja

3D printed robotic limb, which is controlled by a sensor glove and imitates nearly all movements the glove user makes with his/her hand.  The hand is special because of high number of servos and their location in an external servo pack. Mechanical power transmission is solved by „Bowden“ cables (in given project nylon pipes are used together with strong fishing line or sth similar). Given solution excludes in-finger servos, which are typically slow and weak because of their limited size (not to mention their high price and low availability). It is planned to use ordinary closed-loop hobby servos. In  given project, 16 servos are planned for the fingers and 3 servos for the wrist.
Servos receive their signal from a microcontroller, which itself reads values from potentiometers located inside the control glove. In case of movement the servos imitate it by moving the robotic limb joints respectively. Used microcontroller shall be chosen from two variants: Arduino Mega or STM32F4 DISCOVERY. Arduino Mega enables relatively easy and fast programming but has its own limitations because of simplified C language. STM32 however is more professional approach which would enable more sophisticated programming later on.

Knowledge needed to team: C/C++ programmer, 3D modeller, mehatronics specialist, mehanics specialist



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