UMIRobot: An Open-{Software, Hardware} Low-Cost Robotic Manipulator for Education

TL;DR

UMIRobot is an affordable, open-source robotic manipulator kit designed for educational purposes, enabling online and hybrid learning through student-designed control strategies and international teleoperation challenges.

Contribution

This work introduces a low-cost, open-source robotic kit and ecosystem tailored for teleoperation education, supporting remote collaboration and hands-on learning during pandemic restrictions.

Findings

73 kits assembled and distributed across 8 countries

Successful teleoperation between Japan and Bangladesh

Students designed custom grippers and control strategies

Abstract

Robot teleoperation has been studied for the past 70 years and is relevant in many contexts, such as in the handling of hazardous materials and telesurgery. The COVID19 pandemic has rekindled interest in this topic, but the existing robotic education kits fall short of being suitable for teleoperated robotic manipulator learning. In addition, the global restrictions of motion motivated large investments in online/hybrid education. In this work, a newly developed robotics education kit and its ecosystem are presented which is used as the backbone of an online/hybrid course in teleoperated robots. The students are divided into teams. Each team designs, fabricates (3D printing and assembling), and implements a control strategy for a master device and gripper. Coupling those with the UMIRobot, provided as a kit, the students compete in a teleoperation challenge. The kit is low cost (< 100USD), which allows higher-learning institutions to provide one kit per student and they can learn in a risk-free environment. As of now, 73 such kits have been assembled and sent to course participants in eight countries. As major success stories, we show an example of gripper and master designed for the proposed course. In addition, we show a teleoperated task between Japan and Bangladesh executed by course participants. Design files, videos, source code, and more information are available at https://mmmarinho.github.io/UMIRobot/