MeArm at the Leeds City Museum

We were lucky enough to be invited along to the March of the Robots event in Leeds in the UK. The plan was to take five #MeArms and five controllers along for some tough product testing in the hands of a hoard of Mine Craft fans! Our luck continued as two students from the Mechatronics and Robotics department at Leeds University joined me for the day to perform much needed running repairs to our prototype robot arms.

The reason we needed the running repairs were two fold. First that some of the bots were the test units coming from our new production line at Loughborough and had more generous tolerances than strictly were required. The second was that it would seem when two or more boys have access to two or more robots they like to make them fight. Since one of our selling points is that the #MeArm is cheap enough to break and simple enough to repair we could hardly put a stop to this primitive version of Robot Wars.

The experience watching how physical kids wanted to be with the robots was invaluable looking at improving the design and of the different prototype control boards we took a long we learned a lot. People like the idea of joysticks and inverse kinematics but with the random movements first attempted by the majority of the kids at the event the direct servo control was easier to grasp and master. The final version should really be able to switch between the two control methods.

It was a great day out and we were really fortunate to be involved. Many thanks to Playful Leeds for having us at the event.