The 7th iteration of my personal robot arm.
Specs:
- 6DOF + gripper
- RPR wrist (roll, then differential with pitch+roll)
- NEMA 17 for base, elbow, and all wrist. NEMA 23 for shoulder. Base, elbow, and shoulder are closed loop.
- Joints use custom cycloidal drives I designed.
- Arm segments are made of 2020 extrusion, most other parts are 3d printed.
- Gripper uses a DS3218MG RC servo
- Controlled via an ESP32 running a bridge that allows it to be controlled by a ROS master (e.g. raspberry pi running ROS 2).
- Roughly ~500mm reach, and roughly ~800g payload capacity.
- Every part designed from scratch in Onshape.
CAD links:
Cycloidal gearbox (actually usable, would recommend trying out if you need one): https://makerworld.com/en/models/2965474-15-1-low-profile-cycloidal-drive-gearbox-nema-17#profileId-3324878
I'm not linking the CAD for the full arm here yet because it's still highly variable.
Demos:
teleop-web.mp4
Teleoperation via my custom designed AS5600-based leader arm
vla-web.mp4
VLA control via SmolVLA, trained on ~30 episodes (data quality and episode count was low, leading to the shakiness seen here). Video at 3x speed.
Note: I included the firmware in this repo, but it doesn't really have a practical use as it is changing constantly to suite the needs of my larger DUM-E robot.