A robotic arm may seem complicated to be built and controlled. It involves teaching how to program a microcontroller to control some servo motors for repetitive tasks. But you can learn to do it quickly using robotic arm kits.

I’ve seen a lot of robotic arm kits around the web in the last year, but the ones below are the favorites today. The robotic arms from this article have 4 or 6 degrees of freedom to suit of any project.

• 4DOF Robot Arm with Remote Control PS2The robotic arm kit from Banggood is controlled with two ps2 joysticks. It’s a simple way to control the arm and does not involve running an advanced programming code on the Arduino board.

  The range of applications for such a kit is small compared to a programmable kit, but for the price of $39.99, it is a good start for school students. It has a manual and a guide to install the code for the Arduino board.

• LewanSoul LeArm 6DOFThis robot arm is made entirely of metal and aluminum and can lift up a weight of about 250 grams.

  A Bluetooth module is added to the main board of the robot to control the arm with a smartphone or tablet. Also, you have an application that simulates all the joints of the robot arm, so that you can move it at a push of the touchscreen. This is the case if you do not want to use wires to control your arm. Otherwise, you can use wires and a remote control to move the arm on all the 6 axes.

  It is neither the cheapest 6-axis robotic arm nor the most expensive. It has a price of $129.99 on Amazon. The price does not include transport costs.

• 6-Axis Desktop Robotic ArmAt a price of $174.99, Sainsmart offers us a robotic arm made from simple components available to anyone like a PVC pipe. Such an approach is very good for the DIY users who can easily change the structure of the arm. The arm can be used for applications like pick and place, palletizing, and more.

  The robotic arm requires an external power supply, other than the 5V DC from Arduino Uno.

  Another good part of this kit is the documentation. Besides the wiki, you can find a lot of projects that use the robotic arm for different applications like pick and place an object or object detection

• uArm Swift ProThe range of applications for uArm Swift Pro is large compared to other kits. With a repeatability of 0.2mm and a maximum payload of 500g, the arm is suitable for pick&place applications to 3D printing.

  This is not a cheap kit. It has a price of $1,129.95 on Sparkfun. The arm is open-source and controlled by an Arduino Mega 2560 board. For documentation, you can access this link.