A toy robotic arm or a teaching aid? Both.

Here is another article about an affordable toy which can be used as a teaching aid in basic robotics. The award winning Robotic Arm Trainer made by OWI is a robotic arm technology which can be bought assembled or in parts, leaving the joy of robot buildup to you. It has a lifting capacity of 100g so you shouldn’t expect the great usability industrial versions of robotic arms have.

You can control the arm with the standard manual remote control provided. The manual manipulation is done with usage of the five switch wired controller, five motors, and five joints. Night time play is possible and extended life on the gearbox to prolong your control and predictions of the robot’s behavior.

You can command the gripper to open or close, or control the wrist motion of 120 degrees, an extensive elbow range of 300 degrees, base rotation of 270 degrees, base motion of 180 degrees, vertical reach of 50cm, horizontal reach of 30cm,

Another way toOr control the robotic arm is the usage of Images Serial PC Windows Controller. The RAI-Pro USB robotic arm interface kit connects the OWI’s 535 Robotic Arm Edge to a Windows PC USB port. The interface software allows real time interactive control and it contains a built-in interactive script writer. A user may write a script that contains up to 99 individual robotic arm functions (including pauses) into a single script file. Script files may be saved and loaded from disk just like any other standard computer file.

Script files may be replayed up to 99 times for demonstrating computer controlled automation and animatronics. The Robotic Arm PC Interface creates a fun way of learning and experimenting with computer automation and animatronics.

The robotic arm can be controlled by the Speech Controller Kit which connects the SR-07 Speech Recognition Kit to the OWI Robotic Arm in order to allow control of the robotic arm with voice commands.  Each robotic function is controlled by a spoken word.  The user teaches the speech recognition circuit to recognize their voice and commands. Users can select their own words to control robotic arm function.

Some of the added features of this robotic arm include a search light design on the gripper and a safety gear audible indicator is included on all five gear boxes to prevent injury or gear breakage during operation.

The robotic arm is relatively cheap and the price rises with the usage of add-ons. The grabber doesn’t have a 360 degrees rotation like some of the competition robots arms have but the movement speed of it is much greater. Overall, a great toy and a good basic robotics teaching aid.