Friday, January 24, 2014: Does the thought of a miniature industrial robot arm for your desk sound too geeky? Well not if you know the range of things it can do for the ‘lazy’ part of you. Developed by UFactory, the robot arm called, uArm could be your personal robotic assistant that can act as a computer controlled table lamp, a business-card giver, or quite simply it could do your homework.
uArm is an Arduino-powered desktop 4-axis parallel-mechanism robot arm, that is modeled after the ABB industrial PalletPack robot. It can be developed out of laser cut acrylic or wood parts. You can then have a small assembly line right on your desk and make it do things for you as you get busy doing other things, or too lazy to do anything for that matter! The uArm comes with 4 degrees of freedom: three servos on the base control the main movement of the arm and the mini servo on the top moves and rotates the object. The end-effector of the arm is always kept parallel to the ground.
The uArm project is completely open-source, so users can do their experiments with robots and coding using the uArm project. Meanwhile, there is an easy-to-use Windows application for people with no programming background whatsoever.
The team is now working on developing the Android and iOS apps so that the users can control the uArm via Bluetooth as well.
Check out how uArm can be controlled by a mouse: Control uArm by Using Mouse
