7. Conclusions and Future Goal

Even though we were unable to achieve complete functionality of our pick and place mechanism, over the course of the semester, we learned a great deal. This project gave us hands-on experience with laser cutting, 3D printing, and many different hand tools as we spent hours on end creating the many different iterations of our prototype. Looking back, something we would have definitely liked to do was plot the mechanical disadvantage versus position of our mechanism. This would have allowed us to have spotted the hefty mechanical disadvantage the slider experienced, and we would have considered many possible design changes early on in the semester, rather than finding out about it after construction and testing. The design we chose lacks practicality as we have discussed in earlier sections, so we would definitely recommend changing the guide path present in the base plate. Furthermore, we would have liked to make our prototype more robust, as our current design has a few points where it is quite flimsy. Namely, the arm link and shafts that hold the two slider links. Finally, after having figured out our design, we would like to add a grabber/gripper to the end of our arm so that the machine can perform its function.