Mechanism Design
Our basic design goal was to make a mechanism that can make a translation motion along the x-axis, and this x-axis as explained earlier in the actual mechanism helps to locate the location where the device is needed. The other motion was the lift motion i.e the y-axis motion, we want the device to be able to move up and down, and this is necessary because of the height of the gas compartment, or the charging port of the car. It was necessary that we keep this restrictions in mind as part of our design to ensure universality in our final prototype. We finally decide to go with the mechanism that can be seen in Figure 3.1. This device exemplified the motions that we required as mentioned earlier.
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Controlling both the x position and y position of the charger requires two motors to control, but the use of one motor in this class is highly desirable, and we also realized that this class is a mechanism design class and not a controls class. We coupled the two movement together by calculating the linear range of both x-axis and y-axis mechanism and connecting them via a common joint to ensure that one motor was going to be able to drive these two components. One good thing about this design is that although we use one motor for this prototype, we can always use the same mechanism but add another motor to build a fully functional product that is capable of moving freely on the x-y plane to find the port.
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