Our main goals for our design were to make sure that our build would be very rigid and stable. We knew that we wanted to make sure that all of our joints would be held with screws and bearings that were pressure fit into the parts. This would help us achieve a very smooth and sturdy joint for our Arm and Gripper. We wanted to make sure that the gripper would be able to grip a water bottle tight enough so that it would not slip out when we raised the arm. We also wanted the arm and gripper to be independent systems, so we had to plan how we were going to implement our servos with our links. We found that simple flat links with joints would be an effective method to accomplish our gripper mechanism. For our Arm, we wanted to be able to have the necessary range of motion that would be able to grab the water bottle from the base plane and be able to lift the water bottle to a reasonable height. (Around 8 in.)
We were mainly able to plan out our design using Solidowrk Sketches to be able to see how everything would fit together and the spacing of all of our components.