Vaska Robot Hand-Held Controller

August '18 - December '18

I was a Junior Product Designer in a team of four interdisciplinary designers at Volga Instruments Pvt. Ltd. Our problem was to solve the issue of warehousing and warehouse automation, so we built a prototype of a pick-and-place robotic arm. This was a three phase project where in the first phase, we worked as a team to find the product requirements, study the habitat and work with the company to make a business model. In second phase, we designed the product on CAD and did mechanical and electronic testing to build 2 iterative working mock-ups. In third phase, we built a working prototype for installing vison-based AI, we divided the project into three parts of the robotic arm as modular units of:
1. Pick-and-Place arm for installation of AI
2. Electronics Unit for mobility
3. Hand-held controller for manual maneuverability

I was involved in the style and Industrial design of the pick-and-place robotic arm and a hand-held-controller to maneuver the machine for teaching, diagnostics and manual-operations.

I built a Hand-Held Controller with guidance from my Hardware Designer team-mate for the circuit design, electronics and 3D printing. Arduino Nano, three joysticks, 4 buttons and an LED screen were used in the electronics. Some software I used were Fusion 360 to design the body of the controller, Arduino IDE to make the components work and Visual Studio to run tests on the set-up.

Process

01 Project brief

02 Guidelines

03 Concepts

04 Teardown Study

05 Mock-ups

06 Prototype

Project Brief

Requirements for this project were to move the Robotic arm with the help of a device which is portable and manually teach the arm to learn movements by repetition.

We envisioned the robot controller to be a universal plug and play system so a Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm could be maneuvered with the help of the controller.

I was involved in the design of the hand-held controller while my team mate built the electronics hardware for controlling the SCARA and providing a connection for the hand-held controller.

Below is the block-diagram of the Electronics architecture of the whole SCARA, the AI system and controller unit.

Guidelines

I referred to ISO 9241-400 which is the Ergonomics of Human-System Interaction for physical input devices and Standards on Human Factors for HMI.

Below is an image from some of the standards used as reference:

Concepts

I built body design concepts on paper with the guidelines and standard considerations, quickly modelled and 3D printed draft versions to check their feasibility.

Some concepts I 3D modeled to check and many sketches were made, following are some from the lot:

Teardown Study

We did a Teardown of a game controller to understand the intricacies involved in design of a controller. Following are the images we took of a "Quantum" controller that we had with us for study.

Mock-ups

I made a virtual controller software mock-up in Adobe XD and got guidance from my hardware designer team mate for the circuit architecture for the physical controller.

Below is are the 3D printed physical mock-ups we were testing, we selected the second design with 2 handles:

Prototype

Following are some iterations we did for the body.

Following are some color options and the parts split of the body.