Shoe Tying Robot Arm

In the past, building and designing a robot seemed like a foreign concept. Nowadays, robots exist in everyday life. As they have become more advanced through better technology, they can be trained to perform many human actions from lifting objects to organizing them categorically. One of the more essential but simple tasks of everyday life includes tying shoes. It is a concept that a lot of people don’t even think about but still do regardless. However, some people may have difficulties tying their shoes. Through the loss of this ability, these people have some limitations mainly as far as what type of shoes they can wear, specifically Velcro laces. This is our motivation for a shoe-tying robot. Through a well-designed and compact mechanical system, the robot could have a huge impact for disabled people including veterans. From an educational perspective, many schools around the world could build our design to show children the power of modern robotics.

 

The shoelace tying motion may be easy with two human hands, but to accomplish the same with two robotic arms is completely different. Our team's robot arms only have two degrees of freedom compared to the 27 in a human hand. The third degree of freedom was added using a linear rod system, similar to that of a 3D printer. Three degrees of freedom allow for three separate Cartesian axes which are enough to achieve a shoelace knot using inverse kinematics.

 

Three main levels of success were proposed for this project. The first goal of the project is to mimic the shoe tying motion and create a firm knot with the aide of a user putting the laces on the robot's grippers. The next level of success would be to implement a detection system which would remove the user needing to place to the laces on the grippers at the start. The last level of success is to optimize the speed to resemble human speed. As of now, two levels of success have been achieved.