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
RESOURCES
■ CrustCrawler (AX- 12 Smart Arm
Source) — www.crustcrawler.com
■ Forest Moon Productions (GNU
Smart Arm software) — www.forest
moon.com/Software/AX12ArmSample/
November 2008 19