The final Phase 2 robot design followed our Phase 1 robot proposal and further develop the robot arm and refine the hopper. Initially, the design was to spear and flip loops into a top hopper on the robot. However, as we started to consider collecting loops placed in any orientation, the robot arm design soon [...]
In anticipation to collect loops that were placed in any direction, a double claw robot was built. This design was later discarded due to concerns with its efficiency and maneuverability, but the robot was such a massive and impressive creation, its design concept is documented here for the record. The Claw Robot Design was divided [...]
Finally, after several weeks of building and rebuilding our robot’s arm and claw system is finished! So we thought!
The Robot Proposal is divided into couple design components: End Effectors: fork flipper and cable claw Motors: 2 Power Function and 3 NXT motors Drivetrain: rear wheel drive, 2 wide flat rubber tires, 1 tank tread, 2 front skis Sensors: EOPD, compass, ultrasonic sensors Accessories: IR Link, Magnets, Video Camera
Posted in Drive Train, End Effector, Renderings, Robot Design, Robot Proposals, Sensors, Videos 
1 Comment »This so called Cable Claw was an improved version of the previous parallelogram and the linear actuator arms.
Since there are more types of sensors that can be used in this competition than FLL, we continued to experiment with different ones to find which sensors are most feasible for our robot but we are limited to how many sensor ports are available without the HiTechnic sensor multiplexor.
Different designs of the end effectors were tested to see what are the pros and cons with each design. The original design of a claw on the end of a parallelogram to extend the claw out into the crater and the pick up the water loops didn’t work because there wasn’t enought up and down range for [...]
The loop flipper is an arm with prongs that picks up and flips loops back into a hopper. We used an EOPD (Electro-Optical Proximity Detector) sensor to locate the loop and tell us the distance so the robot can position itself. The robot then spears the loops and flips them back into a hopper.
One of the mission requirements is to pick up the loops, so we built a claw and tested it.
Today we finally started the conceptual designs for robot drive-train, ways to pick up the loops, plus using sensors to navigate. Each one of us picked a task to work on.