That Friday the time had come for us, the ammbot group, to start constructing the robotic arm that had recently found its way across the Atlantic straight into our laboratory.

Once we got to the lab, we started by finding an unoccupied work surface where we could unpack, sort and piece together the arm. The arm, as we had received it, was far from its final shape. The box was full of tiny plastic bags, each filled with even smaller metal and plastic bits. To have a good overview of all these pieces we arranged the aforementioned bags on a desktop and took pictures.

The manual was our next stop. It was pretty. We flipped through it and realised we’d be better off splitting up into two groups and working on independent chunks of the whole procedure, which consisted mainly of four subsections:

1. Preparing the servos for installation onto the frame

Preparing the servos amounted to fitting miniature nuts into gaps in the servos so as to allow fixation using screws. Though we had expected it to be a 10 minute job we soon realised that it would take a while before all the servos were ready as the nuts required a perfect orientation in order to fit properly.




2. Constructing the frame

Luckily this was not much of a problem as the manual was pretty clear and the pieces were bigger.



3. Installing the servos

Plastic or metal? That was the dilemma we faced when we realised that we had some of the parts both in metal and in plastic. After some consultation with the manual and a short group discussion we chose to work with the metal pieces because of their overall sturdiness and better outer appearance. After we had fixed the servos to the frame of the arm, it started to resemble the final product as we had seen it on the cover of the manual.



4. Wiring the servos together

The final step was to wire the servos together. This was done in series: output of 1 to input of 2 and etc.

When we had finally finished, four hours had gone by and we were exhausted, having strained our eyes trying to put all the miniature bits together, but it was worth it. We now had a robotic arm to work with and that was all that mattered.

– The Ammbot Group

On 26th February, 2010    the ammbot group accompanied by Prof. Dr. Nuechter set out for Fachhochschule Gelsenkirchen for a day with KUKA robot arms. The mission was to get a hands-on experience with controlling robot arm manipulators. The equipment consisted of two KUKA robot arms, KR 16 and KR 60 plus a host of other robots and robot accesories in the lab. The venue – University of Applied Sciences in Gelsenkirchen at the Autonomous Systems lab supervised by Prof. Dr. Hartmut. Starting from reading manuals, to calibration of the arms, the ammbot group managed to perform a host of manipulations tasks such as Drawing goemetric shapes in paper mounted on table using the arms, manipulating of backpack, coordinating the to robots to do joint task. These were done both using manual control of joint angles as well as when programmed using the KUKA control interface in a simple language primitive to the arms. Other unplanned tasks such as line following using Lego NXT robot, autonomous navigation, and ultimately having the two arms kiss, yeah right, kiss each other to end a robotic day full of robotic fun and robotic people. Below show videos from some of the tasks:

Welcome to the ammbot blog!

Watch out for big changes over the course of the next few days as we get this blog up and running.