Arm group

A week and some days into the building season so far, so here's an update on the robot building process:

After a couple days of designing and sharing ideas, the team has voted to build a robot that has emphasis on the ramp (particularly one that can carry two robots at a time). However, the design for the arm-based robot sounded really good, too, so we have a B-Plan robot that has emphasis on the arm. That's the group I'm in, along with our new mentor, Scott, who's done very well in guiding the students with the ideas, etc. In the arm group, we went through several ideas for our design--one we scraped was using a piston to control the arm (pneumatics would be too heavy and the game this year has set weight limits depending on robot height). We decided to use gears (64:1 ratio) to create an arm which hooks the donuts (name?) from the inside. Today we played around with the wood mock-up of our arm. We wanted to motorize it but we need to order some extra parts. Below is a picture of the pre-mock-up we did with legos and a sketch of our robot arm.


Though I'm a fourth year member of the Robotics club, this is my first time on a mechanical group, so I feel like a rookie (before I've been electrical/public relations). Though I feel like I am out of my element, I'm also surprised at what I'm learning everyday. For example, I'm getting acquited with the building process, like going from designing, to blueprint, then mock-up, and final build. I have to say that the mechanical aspect is much more fun then electrical.


-TRANG
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