4) Manufacturing and Assembly Group 13

We started our assembly process with the driveshafts and related parts. The driveshafts were made of steel ½” hexagonal shafts that were cut using a chop saw to the desired lengths. Using PETG, we 3D printed our bushings and the gears that we used to gear down the 100RPM motor down to 5RPM. Finally, we laser-cut the main chassis and parts for the linkages for the arms mostly out of ⅛” wood (although we did use ¼” acrylic to produce our spacers too).

Figure 4.1: Prototype assembled for practice and visualization.

Once we had all of our parts produced, we assembled our robot. We started by wood-gluing the back wall and interior walls onto the baseplate of the chassis. Once we had the interior walls in place, we then mounted our motor onto the wall and assembled our gear trains on their shafts and pins. We also mounted our inner fourbar assemblies onto their hex shaft. Once this was finished, we moved on to the outer parts of the robot. We placed and glued the walls into position, and then mounted our outer fourbars.

Figure 4.2: Robot under assembly. Interior walls, back wall, motor, gear train, and inner arms mounted and assembled.

We also assembled a ladder for our robot to climb. To construct the base, we used 3x1 in wood planks screwed together to form a right triangle that forms a ramp at a 70 degree angle. Then we laser cut 2x3 ft wood panels to create rungs that were then screwed onto the base.