Design Project of an Open-Source, Low-Cost, and Lightweight Robotic Manipulator for High School Students

TL;DR

This paper presents an open-source, low-cost robotic manipulator designed specifically for high school students to facilitate hands-on STEM learning and robotics education through accessible design, software, and practical assembly guidance.

Contribution

The project provides a comprehensive open-source package including mechanical, electrical, and software components tailored for high school educational use, enabling students to build and learn robotics.

Findings

High school students successfully built the manipulator using provided resources.

Students gained multidisciplinary engineering skills including design, mechatronics, and programming.

The project enhanced students' practical understanding of engineering tools and system development.

Abstract

In recent years, there is an increasing interest in high school robotics extracurriculars such as robotics clubs and robotics competitions. The growing demand is a result of more ubiquitous open-source software and affordable off-the-shelf hardware kits, which significantly help lower the barrier for entry-level robotics hobbyists. In this project, we present an open-source, low-cost, and lightweight robotic manipulator designed and developed by a high school researcher under the guidance of a university faculty and a Ph.D. student. We believe the presented project is suitable for high school robotics research and educational activities. Our open-source package consists of mechanical design models, mechatronics specifications, and software program source codes. The mechanical design models include CAD (Computer Aided Design) files that are ready for prototyping (3D printing technology) and serve as an assembly guide accommodated with a complete bill of materials. Electrical wiring diagrams and low-level controllers are documented in detail as part of the open-source software package. The educational objective of this project is to enable high school student teams to replicate and build a robotic manipulator. The engineering experience that high school students acquire in the proposed project is full-stack, including mechanical design, mechatronics, and programming. The project significantly enriches their hands-on engineering experience in a project-based environment. Throughout this project, we discovered that the high school researcher was able to apply multidisciplinary knowledge from K-12 STEM courses to build the robotic manipulator. The researcher was able to go through a system engineering design and development process and obtain skills to use professional engineering tools including SolidWorks and Arduino microcontrollers.