Joystick-based Motion Control for 6-Axis Low Cost Robot Arm

This paper attempts to present the development of the robot arm for STEM education. Most of STEM education focus on K9 students. The robot arm was developed based on the open source robot arm. Considering to build it low costly, 3D printer was used to print most of structure frames of the robot arm. In addition, position servos and ESP32 are applied in this robot arm development, and three 2-axis joysticks are used to control the robot arm motions. There are two types of motion control developed in this development, manual control and automatic control. Under the manual control mode, users are able to control the robot arm by joysticks straightforwardly. As for the automatic control, users can register specific positions and then ask the robot arm to perform orderly. With the assistance of the robot arm, instructors are able to demonstrate the robot arm in front of students for teaching the concept or principle of robot arm more efficiently.