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I've been curious about how the plastic chassises of the robotic arms in robotic competitions are manufactured. For instance, the following arms clearly have 10-20 plastic parts each, if not more:

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Injection moulding such large parts can easily cost \$5k per mould, so it wouldn't quite make sense to me that university projects would spend \$100k into the chassis production alone when only merely several units are needed. By looking at the finishing, they don't seem to be 3D printed. How are the chassises actually made though?

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  • $\begingroup$ All of the robot examples you showed are purchased machines. $\endgroup$
    – DrMrstheMonarch
    Aug 9, 2019 at 17:10
  • $\begingroup$ @morbo In that case, does that mean the challenge is mostly a software challenge then? Is it fair to say that the teams involved didn't make hardware innovations? $\endgroup$
    – Kar
    Aug 9, 2019 at 19:34
  • $\begingroup$ At most new tooling. Generally those comps would be for planning innovations, or the like, as you said yes $\endgroup$
    – DrMrstheMonarch
    Aug 9, 2019 at 19:50
  • $\begingroup$ @morbo What do you mean by tooling? $\endgroup$
    – Kar
    Aug 9, 2019 at 20:05
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    $\begingroup$ End effector i suppose would be more common to say $\endgroup$
    – DrMrstheMonarch
    Aug 9, 2019 at 20:15

1 Answer 1

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The robot manufacturers or the industries that use them will sponsor these competitions; these sponsorships generally take the form of donated equipment.

Beyond the tax writeoff of donating the equipment, a robot arm manufacturer gets the university to turn out students that have experience with their particular arm. Similar benefit for industries.

If you are, say, an automotive company, then maybe you'll donate the same kind of robot arms and PLCs that you use to a university. Everyone in the engineering department at that university will then train up on your company's preferred robot arms, using your company's preferred PLCs, and then you can come hire up the best-performing students from the graduating classes.

The company gets good PR for sponsoring the competition, a tax writeoff for donating the equipment, and gets a steady stream of people that already have a working knowledge of interfacing to the equipment they'll use in their professional career.

A lot of companies will do this, to get people used to using their software, etc. My university had everyone using Microsoft Office (Word vs. LaTeX), Matlab (vs. Mathematica), Autodesk Inventor (vs. Solidworks) and so on. Those were all provided free to me while I was a student.

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