Team 980 achieved an important milestone last Saturday: we completed a successful Robot Design Review!
Our mechanical design team presented SolidWorks renderings of the entire robot, including motion studies which show we can stow and reach the top cargo opening with our 3-jointed arm. Design details for the worm-gear drives (shoulder, elbow, wrist) were illustrated, with fabrication approach discussed. The end effector design was also presented and is rather mature. We intend to build our first test model this week. Our drive assembly and chassis is already in fabrication, with the layout of electronics in the available space in work. Controls walked through our velocity-control and possible autonomous modes – great progress there!
We talked about ruggedness, simplicity and mass of the robot, particularly for the arm assembly. We plan to drive the robot hard (right up to the end game, where we’ll fly unto level 2). We have some concepts for mounting the mast of the arm to the robot chassis which will absorb energy and would like students to brainstorm their own concepts early this week.
We’re on the right path to build a good robot – let’s keep up the pace and start testing our competition robot in two weeks!
– David Brinza, Lead Mentor