Design and Prototype

For this design problem, we needed to come up with a way to lift the sensors while keeping the electronics attached to the base of the robot and as far from the alpha sensor as possible, with the lone exception being an IR sensor attached to the bottom of the link that would allow for complete autonomous adjustment of the height. In order to do this, we chained together a simple 4 bar mechanism with a slider crank where the output of the 4 bar is the input of the slider crank, as seen in the picture below. After we came up with the built our initial prototype, we found that the slider connecting the arm and one of the links wasn't necessary and that the mechanical advantage of the device was a fraction. When we built our large scale model, we remedied these issues, as can be seen in the second image below.