Doubt regarding publishing of robot in a journal or to be applicable for a presentation

Question

i was just curious about publishing an abstract or stuff like that about a robot I've made all by myself .

Do i really need to make a working model of it or 3d solid works or cad will be enough ? .

I have good machining skills . I can do turning , boring, reaming and stuff on the milling as well to cut rectangular parts from blocks of metal , gears as well from the indexing head .

Do i really need to build the robot , if i want to present my robot in a journal or any conference?

. The work I'm primarily focussed on a robot like making french fries from peeled potatoes , pulling curtains on sensing or not sensing enough sunlight is based on linkages , gear trains just like that in a gear box to amplify the motion obtained from a prime mover and so on .

My friends told me that only new inventions and stuff like ( finding an entire new species of birds from the jungle ). Get published in a journal . I have done the position , velocity and acceleration analysis of the linkage i would work upon. But whenever I want to discuss my application with my friends they start off by saying....( How would your mechanism replace the best , if not it's not worth getting published ) . Is that true as I've seen robots making french fries and curtain pulling robots before but they're really complex and cost a lot even for maintenance . But I'm sure that my robot and my linkages have not been used before ( almost) .

My final querry is maybe , if i can get my robot published if i dont invent the type of robot used in expensive factories ? how will my work be respected and accepted ?

Answer 1

How do you know for sure your robot is special without actually building it? Building the experiment in a repeatable fashion for other readers to replicate (or purchase) is part of the scientific process. If the point of the paper is to write a new Inverse Kinematics (IK) solver, you can demonstrate the kinematics in a simulator with minimal realism to prove the math works. If a robot is supposed to be cheaper to buy and maintain, the only way to prove that is by building and testing your new robot yourself and then presenting a methodology to replicate the construction and programming process (at a high level since you don't get many pages). There isn't enough contextual information to say any more other than it depends.

Answer 2

Publishing about something in a journal is typically for new advances or for confirming/refuting other journal articles. If you've designed a better robot that just works better (nothing novel, just better optimized, etc.) then you typically sell those ideas. You're going to need to build it to prove it, though. Speculation is easy, but there are usually tons of practical challenges that get overlooked until it comes time to fabricate, assemble, and test. Once you've created the prototype French fry machine then you can take it to a restaurant, let them try it for some time, then offer to sell them one. Then you're in business.

If you think your idea has some optimization or other improvement that is not obvious but maybe also not a novel technique then you can try to patent that idea. You do not need a functioning device to file a patent, but patents are quite expensive for regular people to file, probably in the neighborhood of \$10,000 to \$25,000. You'll probably want to build the device just to prove to yourself that it works before you sink that money into the patent, but it's your money to spend how you see fit.

Answer 3

It depends on what you mean by "published".

Academic Paper

The two main robotics conferences are probably ICRA and RSS, but there are a lot of them. And no, you don't have to physically have built a robot. There are lots of theoretical papers, math papers, simulation papers, etc. However, these are peer-reviewed academic journals. So in order to get published, you typically need to show that your work builds upon the existing research. Rarely, if ever, is there a paper along the lines of "look at this cool thing I made".

Maybe watch some of the talks from these conferences, and read some papers to see if this is the route you want to go down.

Patent

Obtaining a patent is considered "publishing" it. Although the legal process for obtaining a patent is long and costly. Although you never need to physically show the thing to the patent office, I believe one of the requirements of getting a patent is to "put it into practice". i.e. The thing needs to be described in sufficient detail that someone else can build it.

Book / Website

Publishing your designs in a book or website is considered publishing. But I'm not sure why you would want to go that route. It doesn't have the same clout as an academic paper, and doesn't provide legal protections like a patent.

Other thoughts

What the "best" mechanism is is often a matter of opinion. There are always tradeoffs between manufacturing costs, maintenance, speed, power, size, dependability, and the list goes on. So there is likely a good reason the creators of the existing products used the things they did.

If you think you discovered a new type of linkage or mechanism, then that is certainly patent-able, and publishable. But there are a lot of them out there. Check out this book: Mechanisms and Mechanical devices Sourcebook by Neil Sclater