Can Can Challenge - Arm Design 3

We decided to use the rotating grabber arm for our robot. Simply because it is easier to program the robot to go back and forth rather than rotating and reversing at the same time.

Steps to how the robot will grab the can and brig it back.

1)The robot, at the starting line with the arm fully extended, will move till the arm is inline with the can.

2)The arm, attached to a servo motor, will rotate and grab the can.

3)The arm will rotate all the way to behind the robot while the robot goes backwards. towards the starting line. The robot arm will keep the can in place while the robot pushes the can back.

4)The moment the can goes past the starting line, we grab the can and the robot moves forward while the arm swigs back to the front.

5)steps 1-4 are repeated till the 2 mins is up.

Can Can challenge - Arm Design 2

We found out that when the arm is fully extended, a few centimeters will be able to reach over the other end of the line to grab the can when the robot is in-between the can line and the starting line. This led us to wonder if a fixed arm with a large hand attached to a rotating robot might be the quickest method to grab a many cans as we can. However, we discovered that the diameter of the can is just slightly too big that the robot have to go in a little further to grab the can. We thought of the robot moving in a diamond shape, but we couldn't guarantee that the robot will be in the same position all the time. So it was back the drawing board.

Can Can Challenge - Arm Design

Our Group today brainstormed on the various designs on what sort of arm can be used to grab the can from one end and transport it to the other end. Designs included the commonly used pincer, a rotating grabber arm, a fishing hook style arm, a crossbow style arm and a spatula style arm. A lot of ideas were thrown out of the window almost immediately because they were either to difficult to make, too impractical or it is obvious it wouldn't work. For example, the spatula arm wouldn't work as we cannot be sure whether the can will be flung back to the starting line and whether the can will even be flung in the first place. The fishing arm might work, but only if we are very precise with our programming, which probably won't happen. A crossbow arm is definitely out of the question, as it is very difficult to make. In the end, we had two left: the pincer and the rotating grabber arm, which are very simple to make and easy to program to grab the can.