Team 26 - Conclusions and Future Work

Project Conclusion:

The culmination of this project was a gripper which successfully achieved all of the goals defined in the Introduction and Background section. The gripper, when scaled down and paired with a matching mechanism for balance, could be attached to the bottom of a drone and be used as both a landing gear as well as a way to hang from tree branches. The current weakest point of the gripper is its force feedback mechanism - the placement and control of the force-sensing resistors causes the mechanism to sometimes continue closing when it should instead stop and hold the branch. One possible solution to this is proposed in the future work section below. This project helped us discover the importance of bringing multiple design ideas to the table, iterating upon them, and performing kinematic analysis on these iterations before selecting a final design.

Directions of Further Work:

Future work could see three notable improvements. The first of these is the material selection - time and money constraints led to the prototype being almost entirely PLA. While the gripper was able to passively support itself under tree branches as desired, some flexion in the parts because of this prevented the gripper from being quite as rigid as we would have liked. Machining these parts out of metal would reduce this issue. Additionally, making the gripper jaws directly oppose one another instead of having a small offset would help the gripper better grasp onto smaller diameter branches. Finally, using positional switches for limit testing and having improved force feedback within the jaws of the gripper would allow the speed of the motor to be maximized without fear of damaging the mechanism by exceeding its kinematic or force limits.