A robotic arm that mimics a user's arm gestures. It is purposed to help people with disabilities and meant for remote operations, and can also be used as a prototype in various other cases.
There are 2 parts to this project. The 1st part is the robotic arm itself, which has 5 DOF (5 servos / 5 "Degrees of Freedom") and uses an Arduino Nano, a Dedicated Servo Driver, and an NRF24L01 for recieving signals. The 2nd part is a gesture controller that straps onto the user's body. It has an Arduino Nano, an NRF24L01 module for transmitting data to the robotic arm, and 2 MPU6050's. The MPU6050s are velcroed onto the user's wrists, and then each direction of motion the user moves an arm in, causes a servo to move.
Programmed in Arduino IDE, models created in Solidworks, schematics created in KiCad.
Here is a very quick demo of the robotic arm being manipulated by the gesture controller that is strapped onto me. The full video is available here. (Note: The white object in my hand is a switch to remotely power on/off the robotic arm.)
Additionally, I made a demo video showing all the joints in the robotic arm moving one by one (using the gesture controller), which is available for viewing here.
A picture of the Robotic Arm:
A picture of the Gesture Controller:
Some demos showing how certain mechanisms in the robotic arm work.
| Gear Movement Demo | Backside of Gears |
|---|---|
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Claw Demo
Rendered pictures of the 3D model I created using my own models designed for 3D printing combined with the servos from GrabCAD. Made in real-world scale and was designed using Solidworks:
Render of gear mechanism underneath the lid.
