Marcus Chen — Robotics Engineer, Founder & Editor
Contact: contact@roboticsengineeringlab.com · Contact form
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Background
I started Robotics Engineering Lab in 2023 after several years of building and debugging robot arms — first as desktop projects driven by an Arduino Mega and a PCA9685 servo driver, later around ROS 2 and ros2_control, and eventually alongside the PLC and safeguarding work that surrounds an industrial cell.
Most robotics writing online falls into one of two buckets: a manufacturer datasheet restated as an article, or a hobby build with no engineering reasoning attached. This site exists in between. The Arduino, wiring, kinematics and calculator pages are worked examples meant to be reproduced. The industrial pages are labelled as specification notes because I do not own a FANUC or KUKA arm, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
What I actually work on
- Mechanical design — link geometry, 3D-printed and aluminium structures, belt and harmonic transmissions, cable routing and dress packs.
- Embedded control — Arduino Mega and ESP32 firmware, servo bus protocols, encoder feedback, power budgeting and brown-out behaviour.
- Motion software — analytical and Jacobian-based inverse kinematics, ROS 2 hardware interfaces, controller managers and simulation.
- Cell integration and safety — PLC handshakes over PROFINET and EtherNet/IP, emergency-stop architecture, light curtains and area scanners, and risk assessment under ISO 10218, ANSI/RIA R15.06 and CSA Z434.
How I write and verify these pages
Every article on this site falls into one of three categories, and the page itself states which one it is:
- Worked examples. Code, wiring and math I have run myself. If a sketch is published, it compiled. If a formula is published, the worked number in the article was computed with it.
- Engineering explainers. Materials, grippers, cooling, cabling and safeguarding. These cite standards or documented manufacturer practice. They are not a certified risk assessment and cannot replace one.
- Specification notes. FANUC, ABB, KUKA, Universal Robots and Standard Bots pages. Values are transcribed from the manufacturer’s own documentation with the access date recorded. These are not independent lab tests, and each of those pages says so at the top.
Where a figure is disputed or widely miscopied online, I say so rather than repeating it. Several industrial pages on this site explicitly flag the incorrect payload, reach and MTBF numbers that circulate in aggregated content, because a buyer who trusts those numbers will size a cell wrong.
Corrections
I get things wrong — a mis-numbered pin, a ROS 2 package that has since been renamed, a part that is discontinued. If you find an error, email contact@roboticsengineeringlab.com with the page name, or use the contact form and select “Tutorial correction”. Corrections are applied to the published page and the modified date is updated. Readers who report an error are credited if they want to be.
Editorial independence
No manufacturer pays for coverage on this site, and no page contains a paid product endorsement. Display advertising through Google AdSense, if and when it runs, is served by Google and has no influence over which hardware appears here or what a payload figure says. See the Privacy Policy for cookies and advertising, and the editorial standards page for the full labelling policy.
Selected guides I wrote and maintain
- Build a 6-DOF robot arm with Arduino — the anchor build for the whole site.
- Inverse kinematics for 6-DOF robot arms and the solver code.
- ROS 2 control framework for robot arms.
- Payload calculator and ROI calculator — both run entirely in your browser and store nothing.
- Robot arm safety standards for the USA and Canada.