In Semester 1, 2018 QUT Robotics Club held a workshop showing members how to design, build and control 4DOF robotic arms. The workshop series spent the first half of the project building Armageddon and implementing a position-based inverse kinematics controller that made the tool-point of the robot follow a trajectory given by keyboard presses and later a gamepad.
These arms were further refined in semester 2 of 2018, with the addition of raspberry pi camera’s and the use of openCV for vision and grasping. This worked towards building a vision system for the robot to autonomously see a ball, given some reference points to its frame of reference, and plan a trajectory to pick up the ball and place it into a box.
The Arms were constructed from HDF laser cutting, with several servo motors, and were powered by Raspberry Pi 3’s. They were programmed in python.

The robot arms and the content used in this workshop series was developed by Andrew Razjigaev (2018 President of the QUTRC). The documentation, python code, lasercutting files, parts list, workshop slides and Matlab simulations are all on the Github repository:

Github Project by Andrew Razjigaev:

https://github.com/Andrew-Raz-ACRV/Robotics-Club-Robot-arm

Armageddon: