Building a Robotic Arm (scioly)

[aaa16797]

I am planning to build a robotic arm for a particular event in division C science Olympiad, but I am relatively unfamiliar with practical electronics (I know all the math, just not the hardware of it). The robot arm needs to pick up particular objects using a control that you make yourself. For the robot, I was planning to use 4 servo motors (rotation, grabbing, wrist, and elbow). However, I was considering a master-slave interaction to control the robotic arm, as I noticed that the top teams generally succeeded with this concept. Also, in my 'research', I noticed that for the master-slave concept, people used potentiometers for the control wired to an arduino microprocessor. What kind of potentiometers would I need, and how exactly do they work? Also, is there programming necessary to use these potentiometers to control the slave arm?

[fiveworlds]

Try something simple like an arduino powered robotic arm. You can build your own arduino if you want but the bought one comes on a neat circuit board. http://lifehacker.com/build-a-kickass-robot-arm-the-perfect-arduino-project-1700643747

 

If you are feeling adventurous the arduino is actually using a chip made by atmel the atmega 328 chip. However you can use visual studio to program atmel chips and they even have their own ide which allows you more options than an arduino will but is harder for beginners https://youtu.be/XyHctU31vas

Edited January 18, 2016 by fiveworlds