Integrating intelligent robot arms into everyday households.

The Project

Hundreds of Hours are wasted each month on doing boring repetitive laborious chores and I wanted a scalable solution in the form of a intelligent robot arm to automate household chores. By surveying people most likely to be responsible for doing chores at home, getting a robot price range. I began coming up with a design for a robotic arm. After 300 CAD iterations and 3 prototype arms testing for functionality and build quality. I assembled an arm the costs only $500 to manufacture compared to its $10k + counterparts. After construction, I trained a yolo image detection model that can detect laundry on the floor. I then set up a coordinate system through a depth-sensing camera, wrote inverse kinematics calculations I send to an arduino which controls actuation using the Accelstepper library.

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Team Comments

My mom spends a lot of time on chores, and I feel responsible to help out however chores are just extrememly boring so taking inspiration from my high school FRC team I wanted to make a robot that can automate doing these boring chores.

The most difficul part of this project was makeing parts that are high strength while also cheap. Robot arm joint have many high tourqe joints that will slip with cheap shaft hubs and 3d prints. My solution for this toque problem with to drill a hole into the shaft and screwing a screw through both.

I would like to test out more designs although I went through 3 arm prototypes There could be still better designs. One being to eleminate the belt drive portion of them arm. It is too many point of faliue and just an added expense to the project. I would also want to code it to do more chores.