Wrist Controlled Robotic Arm

Published on 20 May 2022. Written by Tej Kumar

As there is rapid development in the industries, manual operations for the repeated works has been replaced completely by automation through Robotic Arms. The introduction of these Robotic Arm is a major change which entirely changed the look of an industry. Generally, these Robotic Arm will be pre-programmed for the tasks to which they are going to assign. Now Imagine there is a robotic arm which can be controlled by the wrist (whenever you move your fingers, accordingly the Robotic arm will move). Isn’t it great?? Definitely. Through this project, you are going to create a unique Robotic Arm which can be controlled by your own wrist.

You will need Arduino to interface the microcontroller with the flex sensor, Servo Motors and Motor Driver. You will programme the microcontroller in such a way that whenever you bend your finger which in turn bend the flex sensor, the servo attached to that particular flex sensor which was bent will start moving in the specified direction. Similarly, according to the direction of rotation, we want our robotic arm to move, bend the flex sensors respectively so that you get the desired output.

Project Description:

Flex Sensors: Flex sensors are passive resistive devices that can be used to detect bending or flexing. Flex sensors are resistors that can be used to detect bending. A bi-directional flex sensor decreases its resistance in proportion to the amount it is bent in either direction.
Arduino Uno: The digital and analog input/output pins equipped in this board can be interfaced to various expansion boards and other circuits. Serial communication interface is a feature in this board, including USB which will be used to load the programs from computer.
Servo Motors: A servomotor is a closed-loop servomechanism that uses position feedback to control its motion and final position. The input to its control is a signal (either analogue or digital) representing the position
Motor Driver: Generally the Arduino board is not capable of providing required amount of current for running the motors. So we use a device called Motor Driver which will provide sufficient current for driving the motors.
Bread Board: A breadboard is a construction base for prototyping of electronics.

Project Implementation:

Prepare four Flex sensors for four servos
Attach those Flex sensors to glove and wear the glove in such a way that one finger bending should bend one flex sensor
Interface the Flex sensors and Servo motors
Power the Circuit and Upload the code
Test the Robotic Arm by bending your fingers

Software requirements:

Arduino IDE : You will be needing Arduino IDE software to write and upload the programming logic onto the Arduino Uno board
Thingspeak : Also, you need to create an account in the ThinkSpeak IoT platform to integrate the system onto the cloud and store the data online

Programming language: Arduino Programming (C++)

Kit required to develop Wrist Controlled Robotic Arm:

Technologies you will learn by working on Wrist Controlled Robotic Arm:

Wrist Controlled Robotic Arm

Project Description:

Project Implementation:

Software requirements:

Any Questions?

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