This Scaled-Down KUKA Robot Is Tiny, Adorable, and Functional

You can find robotic arm kits on Amazon for as little as $35, but they’re really just toys. If you increase that budget by about 20 times, you can find robotic arms that are capable of doing some useful (but light-duty) work. Then if you increase that budget by another 20 times, you get into the “real” industrial robotic arm territory. Those beefy boys, like what KUKA offers, are big, expensive, and capable of doing serious work. Redditor RoboDIYer wanted one, but couldn’t justify that. So, they built this tiny KUKA robotic arm that is absolutely adorable.

KUKA is headquartered in Germany and makes very impressive robots, like what you’d see in a high-tech factor welding flux capacitors or something. They’re the kinds of robots that we individuals could never justify purchasing for our silly little hobbies. But RoboDIYer was so inspired by the sleek design of KUKA LBR iisy cobots that they designed and built their own version, scaled down for hobby use.

This robotic arm is very small and only has MG90S servo motors to rotate the joints, so it isn’t going to lift anything heavy and won’t move lightweight things very far. It also doesn’t have any sensors, so it won’t do anything “smart.” But it does have four degrees of freedom and a gripper, plus a robust MATLAB control interface. Those make the little guy capable of potentially doing some useful work, such as moving blocks from one stack to another — a job every roboticist knows is in high demand.

With the exception of fasteners, RoboDIYer 3D-modeled every part of this robotic arm in Autodesk Fusion 360 and then 3D-printed it. That even includes the gripper. The servo motors operate under the control of an ESP32 development board that attaches to a custom PCB to handle the connections.

Aside from the great design, which looks very pretty, the most impressive part of this project is the control app that RoboDIYer built in MATLAB to run on his PC. It has sliders for adjusting the position of each of the joints and gripper, along with the ability to save those positions and run through them in sequence. It even includes a 3D visualization that mirrors the movement of the robotic arm in real life, which is something we rarely see for DIY builds like this.

Best of all, the design files are available for download if you want to build your own mini KUKA LBR robotic arm. It may not have the immense power and heft of the real deal, but it will be a lot more affordable.