Lift System Ideas

[HarveyAce]

Team 3329 is trying to decide whether to use a forkilft based gripper, and a slightly articulated arm, or a personal design of using a parallel bar structure with a simple grip and wrist to pick tubes up and place them at any height (i am personally pushing for this one...). If anyone has other ideas, or expounding on the ones i presented, please share!

This post is meant to provide a simple brainstorming session for teams to share ideas, the more the better!

[inkspell4]

It may be hard using a forklift to place it as those usually have the tube laying flat on the lift

[Leav]

articulating joints (e.g. 4 bar arm, wrist) are usually easier to build, that's the tradeoff here.

lifts give you a straight vertical motion, while arms give you an arc. decide which is better for you in your situation.

at this point you should choose a design ASAP (tommorow) and start working on designing and manufacturing it.

you can keep on debating ideas for the entire build season, but at some point you should stop, decide, and start building otherwise the quality will suffer and the drivers won't have time to train.

lead your team to a decision that is the best possible one within your manufacturing capabilities and run with that ASAP.

[Dumper FTW 435]

My team's going with a lift. We considered the arm, but there are a lot of problems fitting in the 84" cylinder if we wanted to reach the top row. I recommend the lift idea.

[HarveyAce]

our lift wasn't going to have the tubes lying flat on the lift, the design was to have two spreading lift forks that would hold the tube from the inside... like i said above, im trying to push for a design that we can easily do with parts from the kop, because we literaly have no funds and we are a second year team. we want to be able to reach the top pegs but still be able to get around, and I view the articulating arm poorly, mainly because so many things can go wrong, more points of articulation = more points for error.
We are also a second year team, and too many on the team want to do too much with too little time/funds/parts.

[Unglued]

OR a combination of both

[Rey]

My team decided on an articulating arm. But after some design time we went with a lift portion to the elbow and an arm That has a wrist like function.
It is a combination of both worlds!