It's from Malaysia. I wonder if it could be a direct translation gone wrong? I see that it's submitted through this computer gaming conference in Jakarta, which is associated with 'IEEE Indonesian Section', whose submission criteria says that "Non-presented papers will be pulled from submission to IEEE Xplore." These papers must slip through the cracks. I wouldn't be surprised if the conference paper peer reviewers didn't review the non-presented papers and forwarded them directly to IEEE Xplore (managed in the USA), expecting them to review them (or not really caring, since it's not being presented in their conference).

Even [formerly] trusted big publishers like Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, and Sage have accepted papers with no peer review (at least, they did a few years ago). I wrote about John Bohannon's experiment to get publishers to accept his purposefully and glaringly flawed paper in Science (04 Oct 2013, Vol. 342, Issue 6154, pp. 60-65, DOI 10.1126/science.342.6154.60): Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

Vigilence, that is the price we have to pay for the proliferation of scientific resources and industry. (Yep, I'm quoting The Drumhead... again.) Informed skepticism is a skill that does not appear to be keeping pace with technology.

The sad part is that my 16 year old granddaughter (BC school system) still comes home with the conversation and related paperwork from her classes

Good job on explaining something complex in clear language.

What electronic design program did you use?  Does it allow you to design PCBs?

Also, what software do you use to visually model your Arduino circuit connections? 

Thank you!

I used Audodesk EAGLE for the above circuits. I like it's simplicity and hobbyist support. I've used KiCAD and gEDA with some success as well. The problem I find in attempting to compare EDA packages is that they each have a large learning curve. There is no way to quickly or easily compare them. Saying that, if I were to start working with electronics more regularly, I would probably go for KiCAD.

I don't have a program to visually model my Arduino connections. TinkerCAD does it, I think (they absorbed Circuits.io's Electronics Lab).

Hi Tyler.  Great robotic arm. Very sophisticated.  Sonar is a sound wave to detect distances.  I wonder if all distance sensors work on sonar or if you chose it for a specific reason.  

Why do you want the robotic hand to repel from surfaces?

I believe the hand will grasp items ... maybe at a set distance higher than a surface.  How will you figure the grasping in?

Awesome robot. 

I don't actually want the arm to stay away from all surfaces. A method similar to this will keep the end-effector from bumping into large objects and the 'floor', and to scan an area to figure out where objects are. This blog post was to fulfill one of the requirements in assignment 2. Though I will first have this gizmo pick up a standard object at a set location, I may get it to look for various objects within an area, figure out if any of them are small and isolated enough (claw won't knock into other objects), then attempt to grab one of them and move it to another standard location or area.

There are many types of distance sensors, though sonar is pretty great for how cheap it is. Runner-up is infrared (see [link] for examples). The cheap versions of these technologies use time-of-flight to determine distance. (Phase difference is used in other arrangements of similar tech. Some motion sensors, which could tell you the distance to something with the right sensor arrangement, is often done with changes in infrared intensity.) I think Mataric goes through several distance sensors.

I looked at your code. Nice and lean. I feel encouraged that it didn't take a hundred pages of sketches to make that arm move.