WayBotDu: A low cost articulated arm platform for education

The use of robotics in industry has been increasing, especially in the manufacturing systems. Using articulated arms type, robots are used to assemble different components in manufacturing. Flexibility of the robots provides movements that are difficult to tackle by human. As a consequence, early age understanding, knowledge, and education about articulated arm become more important. This paper provides a low cost platform for education and learning. An articulated arm, designed as a Javanese puppet character Semar is built using 4 servo motors and acrylic links. Following a 4R-rotational structure, the forward and inverse kinematics are built using typical Denavit-Hattenberg (DH) convention. A custom user interface made using LabVIEW serves a tool to test, simulate and create experiments with the platform. The user interface, available in executable file for mobility, sending and receiving data with the arm platform via serial communication. All components, electrical and mechanical, are all bought in local shop and cost not more than 200 USD to fulfill the “low cost” concept. The experimental results show that the proposed low cost platform has root-mean-square errors (RMSE) for forward kinematics movements in x, y, and z direction of 1.23 [cm], 1.10 [cm] and 0.71 [cm] respectively. For the inverse kinematics test, the errors are 1.38 [cm], 0.66 [cm], and 0.74 [cm] in x, y, and z respectively.