Quote:
Originally Posted by aatuck
Sure, basically right now we have the kicker assembled as two bars coming down perpendicular from a main axle (parallel with the front of the robot), and a bar between the two. There's a bar in the middle of the kicker, and another on the front of the robot (which functions as a hard stop), and latex goes between the two.
We're not totally sure how well this mechanism will translate into the robot though, because the mechanisms so that a motor will pull it back, or release it are still being worked on. We got it to pull back decently (once the motor arrives), but aren't entirely sure if our release will be strong enough.
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Our team has a kicker similar to yours... we are using the tension of the surgical tubes to actuate our kicker. We too had problems figuring out how to load and release our kicker without interfering with the tension of the surgical tubes. Our solution to the problem was to use pneumatics to load the kicker and then used a simple gate latch that we found at Lowes.
The gate latch that we used was this:
http://www.lowes.com/pd_51080-1277-S...87149&Ntt=gate latch&Ntk=i_products&pl=1¤tURL=/pl__0__s?newSearch=true$Ntt=gate latch
we replaced the part of the latch on the kicker with a u-bolt so that the latch could be centered. Our pneumatics are not connected to the actual kicker. The pneumatics are just used to load the kicker into the latch and then the pneumatics are retracted back so that once the kicker is release from the latch the pneumatics do not cause a resistance against the pulling from the surgical tubing.
here is a video showing how we load our kicker... sorry that it is sideways!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85GhXHJaWW8
hope this helps!