Conclusion and Video Demonstration

Conclusion:

While the design of the mechanism itself works, we ran into some issues with electronic components. Because of the resolution of the IR sensor, we had to scale the model up past the actual size, but we didn't take this into account when purchasing the servo motor. When producing a model to be deployed, a slightly stronger servo should be used, in order to be certain that the weight of the alpha sensors will not burn out the motor, along with a better overall IR sensor in order to actually be able to use it when it is as close to the ground as the alpha sensor will be. A low-pass filter should also be used for the circuitry in order to filter out any noise from the IR sensor. This is because the noise would cause the servo to jump around quite a bit and eventually actually burned out the servo. Another potential area to further investigate would be finding a way to link the motion on both arms using a single servo instead of having to use a servo on each arm. 

Video Demonstration: