A Low-Cost Manipulator for Space Research and Undergraduate Engineering Education

摘要

This paper describes a supervised undergraduate design-build-test effort in which young students supported by the University of Michigan's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) were able to design, build, test, and extend a robotic manipulator of dimensions comparable to those of a human arm. This project had two goals: to expose students to the design-build-test process in the co ntext of robotic electrical, mechanical, and software systems, and to construct an artifact, the manipulator, for the subsequent support of graduate-level research in human-robot collaboration pursued by the first author. This manipulator system was low-cost, required little pr ior knowledge of machining, and was required to operate robustly and safely in an envir onment shared with its human collaborator. In this paper, we describe the desig n-build-test process from the pedagogical and system engineering perspectives. Ultimately, t he students focused their efforts on research in sensing, software, and mathematical modeling of the manipulator, emphasizing the fact that hardware DBT is only the first step t o a fully-operational robotic system. This was a key observation not made by many Aerospace students, even those exposed to DBT activities that typically highlight physical vehicl e design while black-boxing sensors and software. This paper describes the process by which this group was educated in the context of the manipulator DBT process. We briefly discuss subsequent manipulator use and extension both for graduate research and ongoing undergraduate DBT exposure.