Manufacturing and assembly of our prototypes all used the resources in Texas Inventionworks, which include 3D printing and laser cutting. We would like to thank Texas Inventionworks, as well as our TIW teacher assistants Victor Guzman and Ashwin Hingwe for their help. For our prototyping process, we first began with prototyping the arm mechanism. Once that was completed, we added the claw mechanism.
Our first prototype was a proof of concept for the arm mechanism, shown below. Every piece was made of laser cut wood- the base, links, and shafts. A motor was not used in this prototype, nor was a proper claw added. Instead, we moved the input link manually to watch the position profile of the point of connection for a claw. This was a quick prototype to determine that the design made in MotionGen is viable. From this prototype, we were able to confirm our mechanism design.
