Wooden Robot Model

For quite some time now, I wanted to create a robot model to use it in the classroom. I started imagining it as a 3D printed model, then thought of making it out of styrofoam, converted the idea to carton, but was always stopped by the lack of materials around. Also, the fact that we’ve been teaching online for the past year and a half was not helping.

Last week, I thought of wood. And the moment I thought about it I was wondering how come I didn’t think about this all this time! It is the obvious solution, as there is always wood scraps readily available that I am saving from other projects, plus I have the tools to work with it. So, I spent ~2 years thinking about this, and eventually it took me around 20’ to make it! Here is the result.

Using this, I can demonstrate the concepts of the Direct Geomtric Model and Jacobian (part of the Robotic Systems Control) much easier.

It currently features 4 degrees of freedom, all of them revolute, but I am planning to add a prismatic joint too. Hopefully it won’t take me another 2 years to finally add it.

Edit: I added the prismatic joint too! You can see how it looks below