Nuts and Volts - November 2008

PERSONAL ROBOTICS

■ FIGURE 15. Old school meets cool tool!

THANK YOUS

■ I would like to take a moment to thank the good folks over at CrustCrawler for providing this most excellent robotic arm for use in the project, Nuts & Volts Magazine for helping set it up, and Paul Atkinson and James Delaney for their invaluable assistance with this project.

situated. Could be this “hand me a tool” business is a bit trickier than I had imagined! I sat back and started to think about how I could make sure the robot’s environment would be as reliable as the arm itself.

SAME BAT TIME, SAME BAT CHANNEL!

Luckily, I’ve got tough calluses on my ambition and I was able to pull myself from the wreckage of first contact and continue on my quest for a robotic helping hand on my bench. I’ve managed to sweet-talk one of my regular roboteers into helping write some software to allow foot-pedal control of the arm (Figure 14) and another one to help me build a “tool gallery” to hold the tools exactly where the arm can find them.

Look for all the details of my continuing quest for a helping hand at the workbench in ROBOBENCH — Part 2! As always, if you have any questions or comments, I can be reached at vern@txis.com. NV