2. Problem Statement

We decided to replicate the motion of this mechanism with the constraints that we have in this class. We embarked on a journey of making a mechanism that will imitate the necessary motion that will encompass the autonomous process of charging a car or refueling a car with little or no user input. We believe that this will be future of gas stations and charging stations for cars in the nearest future.

We searched for existing mechanism that is used for such field. The following two videos show two main solutions. One is to use a robot arm, the other one is to use a  Cartesian robot. However, for the robot arm, controlling the motion of the charger is more complicated than the Cartesian robot, and the Cartesian robot takes up a lot of space on the ground. Hence, we want to design a mechanism that is both easy to control and small in size.

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And ultimately this design will be able to trace a certain trajectory to achieve this goal, but that is beyond the scope of our design. A classic example of that is in the video below. 

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