Hydraulic Arm Research

6th grade science students at the Beebe School can use the following links to research their robotic arm project:

• Engineering Design Process. Students must locate the steps of the Engineering Design Process and add them to their blue design journal.
• Constructing arm joint examples. Look carefully at the way these devices are constructed... we will be using similar materials.
• How Hydraulic Machines Work. Describes hydraulics and has some clickable images to aid understanding.
• Joints in the human skelton with cool pictures... it doesn't show the muscles, however. That's pretty important! How can they move?
• The Human Arm... the beginning is helpful but the end gets really complicated and technical.
• Medical info about human joints... along with names of some joints.

Students may also wish to peform web searches using Google.com or Wikipedia.org for keywords like:

• mechanical arm
• hydraulic arm
• robot arm OR manufacturing

Be sure to take notes about what you learn in your design journal. You can draw quick sketches to help you remember new and strange devices. UPDATE: The following MIT page, Designing Mechanisms, Might be useful for cherry-picking specific ideas for use in your project. If you use an idea from that book, be certain to note that in your design journal.