Duckiebot Arm

Collaboration with Duckietown. World's smallest fully-programmable mobile manipulator.

I had the pleasure of designing and building a 4-DOF prototype arm module with Duckietown, a company offering small autonomous vehicles (“Duckiebots”) for education and research. The arm is fully programmable and seamlessly powered by the Duckiebot’s onboard computer and battery. With the arm module, the Duckiebot is among the world’s smallest fully-programmable mobile manipulators.

The Duckiebot Arm features a palm camera with 30 FPS 2592 × 1944 resolution.

I used a combination of 3D printing and off-the-shelf components to build the arm. The servos are Dynamixel XL330-M288, which offer six different control modes. The arm features a 2592 × 1944 pixel palm camera streaming up to 30 FPS. A comparison between the Duckiebot and the Duckiebot with arm module is shown below.

Comparison between the Duckiebot and the Duckiebot prototype with arm module.