DeltaZ: An Accessible Compliant Delta Robot Manipulator for Research and Education

Abstract

This paper presents the DeltaZ robot, a centimeter-scale, low-cost, delta-style robot that allows for a broad range of capabilities and robust functionalities. The DeltaZ robot is 3D-printed from soft and rigid materials with a design that is easy to assemble and maintain, and lowers the barriers to utilize. Functionality of the robot stems from its three translational degrees of freedom and a closed form kinematic solution which makes manipulation problems more intuitive compared to many other manipulators. Moreover, the low cost of the robot presents an opportunity to democratize manipulators for research and education settings. We describe how the robot can be used as a reinforcement learning bench-mark. Open-source 3D-printable designs and code for building and using the robot are available to the public.