Current status of robot arms

[birdog357]

I'm working on a station and I'll be needing an RMS shortly. My computer does not handle large part counts well so how are you guys building arms in a conservative fashion? I have both DLC and use mods so pretty much all options are open to me.

 

A specific question is how do you terminate the end? What are you using for a grapple?

 

Is it possible to do a Canadarm2 which can inch worm across the structure?

 

Are there any mods that use the breaking ground code to do minimal part arms? I'm not afraid of IR but all the minimalist arms I've found are way out of date.

 

Thanks all,

Birdog

[AHHans]

I use neither mods nor have I made a real robot arm, so there is very little that I can help you with. But I have two comments:

6 hours ago, birdog357 said:

A specific question is how do you terminate the end?

If you want to keep your part count low, then is there an alternative to the Klaw?
You could make a grabber with the robotic parts and grip-pads, but that'll use quite a few more parts than a single Klaw.

And once you get to testing your creations I encourage you to test out locking (engaging the servo lock) the robotic parts. That makes them much more rigid and allows autostruts to traverse the robotic parts. (But don't activate autostruts on the robotic parts themselves, that's still bugged.)

[birdog357]

Just did a little testing. You can not inchworm with the claw. It does not provide control to the arm once you decouple the shoulder.

My test rig was mated docking port jrs(DPJ) triple servos rotated 90 degrees each when attached to simulate the Canadarm2 wrist, telescoping cylinder, servo and then repeated the design in mirror fashion down to DPJs and then stuck a claw on the backside of the last port. The claw did work to grapple but would not provide control as I previously stated. I was how ever successful with moving the arm from DPJ to DPJ on the same base object just like the real arm does. Working on the launchpad is flimsy and bouncy but it did work. 

[AHHans]

3 hours ago, birdog357 said:

Just did a little testing. You can not inchworm with the claw. It does not provide control to the arm once you decouple the shoulder.

Well, you can keep control if you add a probe-core to the robot-arm itself. But you still cannot inchworm from Klaw to Klaw, because once you release the first connection (I tested it with a Klaw, and a decoupler) then the "secondary" Klaw looses it's connection. I now recall that in the change logs for one of the 1.7.x updates it was mentioned that this was fixed for docking ports. I guess the people at Squad didn't think of the Klaws when they did this.

4 hours ago, birdog357 said:

Working on the launchpad is flimsy and bouncy but it did work. 

Ah, yes, chaining a lot of robotics parts together is a floppy business. It gets less floppy when using servo locks, but then managing the locks can get tedious...