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Color Sorter

            4 DOF Manipulator arm

 

 

Daniele Benedettelli,

August 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

  This manipulator arm has 4 Degrees of Freedom (read motors): one to turn, one to move vertically, one to move horizontally and the last for the gripper.

Its parallel kinematics allow the tool to remain always oriented downwards.

 

The shape is inspired to the real FANUC manipulator arms used in the factories for goods handling.
 
 

A CAD rendering of the ball sorter

A real FANUC M-410iB

 

 

 

The robot uses RC servos instead of NXT motors,

because they allow more precise movement control, ease of assembly, smaller dimensions. The servos are driven using MINDSENSORS NXTservo interface.

 

The end effector can be easily replaced.

 

Here you can buy MINDSENSORS devices.

Here you can find a lot of servo motors.

 

 

 

In the picture at right, you can see the custom mount for the microservo. To make the microservo LEGO-compatible, I glued a but Pin Joiner and a 1x3 liftarm to the servo case, and a Technic bush to the horn.

 

 

I modelled the missing LDRAW parts for the Mindsensors NXT servo mounts, plus the microservo custom mount that I invented. As you can see in the rendering, the servos can be assigned different colors, in order to distinguish them in your model.

Download the new parts here. To install, extract the archive into your Ldraw root folder.

You can find the other Mindsensors servo parts in this Philo's webpage.