Building an anthropomorphic robot arm

    Hi everybody, I'm a new member of the forum. I have a question: I'm trying to design a 6 DOF robot, in order to simulate satellite docking at my university… I have some requisites: working area must be not smaller than a 1m*1m*1m cube, the end effector must support at least 100N of force and the joints must provide at least 10Nm… what should I start with? I will use an anthropomorphic configuration, with 3 rotations and a wrist with another 3 rotations, for a total of 6 DOF. The main problem is the motor choice: should I use a gearbox? I was thinking of installing an harmonic drive gearbox, but how do I choose the gear ratio? ???

    Yeah, for anything needing high accuracy, you're going to spend more trying to make a roll-your-own solution work than on simply buying a good off-the-shelf solution.


    The KUKA LWR robot is specifically made for R&D use -- it's a bit pricey, but it's really popular with university labs and has a very open control architecture for doing things above and beyond what normal industrial robots do.


    Failing that, a decent small-size KUKAbot running RSI can still provide a means of control from outside sources, so if you wanted to slave the robot to, say, a MatLab model, you could do that.

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