VI. Conclusions and Future Work

The following video presentation in Figure 1 gives an overview of the project from start to finish. 

Figure 1. Project Presentation

The final assembly was successful in its attempt to recreate the motion of the PMKS simulation. As you can see from Figure 2, the joints moves smoothly with no hesitation. 

Figure 2. Final Mechanism Prototype

Once I added the motor to the mechanism, I ran it at an initially slow speed in order to place it in the correct position that would maximize the smooth mobility of the mechanism. Figure 3 shows the motor powering the mechanism. 

Figure 3. Motorized Mechanism

Once the entire mechanism and hardware was finalized, I was able to test out the actual ring toss game itself. I increased the speed of the motor to make the game challenging. I had a great time numerously attempting to land a ring on a horn of the moving longhorn. I blame missing the target on my poor aim rather than the mechanism itself, but I was able to land a few on the horns. One of my successful landings can be seen in Figure 4.

Figure. Ring Toss Game in Action

I consider this project to be a success since I was able to replicate the motion from my initial simulation. The motion was relatively smooth, and considering the fact that I had limited access and availability to traditional joint and link materials, I believe that my makeshift links and joints worked wonderfully. In the future, I would probably change the ring toss rings to be larger to land on the horns a bit easier. I would also prefer for the mechanism to reach its full range of motion, so I would probably use a different motor that could fulfill this wish.