Hydraulics and Robots

Applied Technology Teacher

Robotics class students built a T-Bot II robotic arm that operates on hydraulics. A hydraulic system is one that uses a liquid as a force. The fluid is water and is forced through the small opening of a syringe, through a tube and then forced out the plunger of a syringe a few inches away. Other examples of hydraulics are the brakes on your car and some jacks.

After building the robotic arm, students studied some robot terms like axes, work envelope and end effector and then had some exercises to complete. One was lifting a foam block onto a point of the Cartesian Coordinate system grid determined by the roll of a dice, into each quadrant.

Another exercise was a timed activity competing against their classmates to see who could move and stack the foam blocks in the shortest time.

The last activity was simple machine identification and determining the work envelope of a robotic arm.