Abstract:

The increased accessibility of new technologies in the recent years continues to motivate the integration of robotics into education. While artificial intelligences increase in popularity, robotics continue to appeal students and schools through hands-on electronic projects in which they can create their own devices. However, the complexity and technical knowledge required to understand robotic systems lead students to resort to more basic robotic kits, which are usually cheaper than the devices used for research.

This paper presents a learning environment to introduce students from any educational level into robot manipulation, the most common way in which robots interact with their surroundings. This environment is composed of a parallel jaw gripper and a graphic user interface (GUI) to facilitate its actuation and display information about the grasp. Through this GUI the student can understand grasping operation and the importance of sensorization to effectuate secure grasps. Additionally, this environment can be integrated using the Robot Operating System (ROS) environment into the ADAM (Autonomous Domestic Ambidextrous Manipulator) robot, a manipulator robot companion for domestic elderly assistance, developed at the University Carlos III of Madrid, which allows to show students real-life demonstrations of manipulation in assistive robotics.

For this reason, the gripper is designed attending to the requirements and restrictions of the ADAM robot, while maintaining its modularity to be used independently. This device uses a simple control and provides feedback from its grasp thanks to the use of simple electronic components including a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, a conventional servomotor and force sensing resistors. This allows to obtain a light compact low-cost gripper with sufficient capacity for grasping everyday objects. The paper includes
the gripper and GUI’s design and application examples with students which show the viability of the proposal.

Therefore, the main objective of this work is to develop a learning platform to introduce students from any education level into robot manipulation, while being cost competitive, replicable, and suitable for research.

Keywords:

Education, Robotics, Parallel Jaw Gripper, Graphic User Interface.