This project was entirely designed and fabricated from scratch as an opportunity to further my expertise in the broad field of engineering. This 6DOF robotic arm uses 6 servos to actuate 6 independent degrees of freedom. Programmed with inverse kinematics, the robotic arm almost acts as its own CNC machine with an unfortunately large tolerance. The robotic arm is controlled with a personally designed executable file programmed with python kivy. The completion of this project alongside my emerging mechanical engineering courses lead me to look at the project critically, illustrating how much I have learned through the project and as a whole through my education.

I challenged myself to develop a machine with the ability to position the claw of the arm into a specific x, y, z coordinate location. To do this required inverse kinematics. Taking the requested coordinate, the program would perform trigonometric calculations to find the required angles of all 6 servos (a daunting task for an engineer that had not taken robot motion planning yet).

During the prototyping stage of the robotic arm, I created a simple text interface which was useful, however not the end goal. Soon enough I researched the Kivy library and watched tutorials to develop my own executable application. This graphical interface communicated to the robot over a python socket library and standalone wifi-network hosted by the robot. Included in the interface were digital joysticks, an open-source library. The interface could also receive information from the robot if requested.