A Small 3D Printed Robotic Arm for Teaching Industry 4.0 and Robotic Engineering

Industrial robotic arms with at least six degrees of freedom, a key component of Industry 4.0, even small ones, are still relatively inaccessible to a wider range of users, experimenters, and educators due to their high cost and the need to ensure operational safety. Moreover, the industrial robotic arms are often closed systems, which makes these machines unsuitable for mechanical modifications and teaching robotics engineering. We therefore took a different path, namely we wanted to construct our own small desktop robotic arm with as much of our own creation as possible and everything as open-source so that students and other researchers could freely use our work and modify it. 3D printing technology is a perfect fit for us, which is currently so advanced that it makes 3D printing a viable manufacturing process for prototyping and manufacturing various products on a small scale, including small machines, and also mechanical parts of robotic arms. From our point of view, we consider 3D printing as a tool for making robotic engineering accessible to a wide group of students. In this article, we describe the design and construction of an affordable yet powerful robotic arm with 6 (+1 for the end effector) degrees of freedom, which we named Real Robot One (RR1 in short). In the design of the RR1, we emphasized the greatest possible use of locally produced parts (especially bearings and other non-printed parts). Since the RR1 is much smaller than industrial robotic arms, the safety costs are eliminated with our robot - it is completely safe to be in touch with the robot during operation. Our robot can serve as a teaching aid for preparing experts for Industry 4.0 as a small model of a production line consisting of these robots can be set up in a small laboratory.