Manufacturing and assembly of our prototypes all used the resources in Texas Inventionworks, which includes 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.
Our second prototype was a more robust version of the first. See the Solidworks images, pictures, animation video, and explanation video below. This prototype also consisted of laser-cut wood links, like the first prototype, but was upgraded to include metal shafts and collars, 3D printed spacers (in green), and a motor. This prototype also had a place-holding, non-functional claw to help visualize the final mechanism. The purpose of this prototype was to create a working model with the same movement as the final mechanism. From this, we confirmed that our design is viable and that the links all connected smoothly based on our design. However, we did notice the hitch in the arm as it moved from each side. We believe that this was due to the rusted-over bearings, and so we planned to use new bearings and linkages for our final design. Additionally, this was due to the weight of the claw being shifted from one side of the origin (see Solidworks images below) to the other, as touched on in the explanation video. However, we hoped that the new bearings would fix most of it.
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Our final prototype was also the first prototype of the claw. Due to the time constraints of the semester, we were not able to iterate on the claw design. A more detailed description of the final prototype and the claw prototype can be found in section 6, “Final Design and Demonstration.”