Centrifugal Arm Claw

[farmersvilleRob]

Originally Posted by couvillion

Your post so far suggest that the timing of the release would be computer controlled. That seems really hard, and difficult to debug unless you have a high speed camera around. I would suggest that you make your release mechanical based on rotation of the arm. And the use a motor to adjust that release point forward or back. It is mechanically complex, but that can be understood without a high speed camera.

Well we havbelieve with an encoder (might need a better one than the FIRST choice ones) we can track the exact RPM the arm is moving at then have it correct tself before launch. It all is set to happen <2.5 sec, but we have an amazing programming team. We think the only hard part is finding how the motor corrects itself because we don't want an oscillating graph where RPM is oscillating on the y axis over the x axis of time because it's over correcting. So that's an experimental stage. We are actually hoping the cup design would be able to release the ball on a tangent to the rotation without touching the ball. If the cup is too deep, we have a shallow one and we mount the servo arms (1 cm long urethane fingertips) parallel to the x axis (perpendicular to the rotation) to also decrease chance of even bein involved in the ball's release other than the release of force.