Learn Robotics Programming

Robot arms

Robot arms range from very tiny and delicate robots for turning eggs, to colossal monsters moving shipping containers. Robot arms tend to use stepper and servo motors. We will look at servo motors in the pan and tilt mechanism used in this book. An impressive current industrial arm robot is Baxter from Rethink Robotics:

The Rethink Robotics Baxter Robot

Many robot arms are unsafe to work next to and could result in accidents. Not so with Baxter; it can sense a human and work around or pause for safety. In the preceding image, these sensors can be seen around the "head." The arm sensors and soft joints also allow Baxter to sense ...