Developing a Robotic Kit for Mechatronic Engineering Education

摘要

Abstract Developing Robotic Tools for Mechatronic Engineering Education William Babikian, Shouling He*, Amir Elzawawy, Hossein Rahemi [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Department of Engineering and Technology Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology 8601 23rd Ave, Flushing, New York City, 11369This paper presents the development of robotic tools for the courses in the MechatronicEngineering program at Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology. As we know,mechatronics is a discipline that combines elements from mechanical engineering, electricalengineering, computer engineering and control engineering. Students in the mechatronicengineering program are required to possess not only multi-disciplinary knowledge but also theability to balance theory with experimentation to solve problems in the real world. Towards theeducational requirements, we need to develop various educational tools. The robotic tool, VEXrobotic arm with a granular jamming gripper, is one of them.The VEX robotic arm has four degrees of freedom, controlled by four DC motors. For eachdegree of movement, an encoder is installed to measure the rotational angle. The robotic armcan have two different grippers, one is a traditional gripper. The other is a granular jammergripper. The jammer gripper is made from a rubber balloon filled with coffee grounds. A vacuumis connected to the balloon through vinyl tubing and funnel. When the air inside the balloon isremoved, the coffee grains pack together and become rigid. This enables the gripper to grasp andhold on to an object of any shape.Using the robotic arm with two different types of grippers, students can verify different roboticdesigns: (1) robotic trajectories for the robot arm to pick up an object; (2) the maximum angularvelocity of each link when the robotic arm moves; (3) according to the available torque providedby each motor, the maximum weight of the load and the weight of each link; (4) the force controlfor the granular jammer gripper, i.e. how large gas pressure the vacuum should provide so that itcan take a certain weight of load.The granular jamming gripper is a creative and universal solution for robotic gripper designs. Weimplement it using the economic and flexible VEX robotic arm. As an educational platform,students can test their robotic designs on it. Furthermore, the easily implemented robotic systemwith creative design of the gripper inspires students to explore more novel and feasible solutionsfor the development of robotic arms and robotic manipulators.* Corresponding author