Manipulator designs

[Madison]

There are as many different mechanism designs as there are FIRST robots, and while some certainly work better than others, they're all largely based on similar concepts and principles.

Rather than know explicitly how an arm or elevator mechanism built by team XXXX works, I think it's far more valuable to gain understanding of common engineering mechanisms and find ways creating a solution for your design problem based upon those ideas.

Ken offers excellent advice to observe while designing such mechanisms, but I think it's important that your actual designs are based on knowledge of the best ways of accomplishing a task rather than facsimiles of things you've seen on some other team's robot.

Edit: It occurs to me that you may want to dig up teams' Autodesk Inventor Award entries and examine those for a great look at how they accomplished different tasks in their robot design.

[Max Lobovsky]

I have a pretty good grasp of the basic principles involved. What I'm looking for is a bunch of solutions to this problem that other people have used. I may be knowledgable to tell a good design from a bad one, but that doesn't mean I could come up with one.

Where can I find other team's Inventor Award entries? I have seen maybe 1 or 2 team sites that have them.

[Adam Y.]

I have a pretty good grasp of the basic principles involved. What I'm looking for is a bunch of solutions to this problem that other people have used. I may be knowledgable to tell a good design from a bad one, but that doesn't mean I could come up with one.

I would recommend Building Robot Mechanisms. It's nothing but solutions. Almost everything related to robotics is in that book. It includes (usually) easy to understand picures of how the devices works. A whole chapter is devoted to arms designs and the differnces between the three designs. Also Mechanisms and Mechanical Devices Sourcebook I heard is an excellent book but I am not sure if there would be any information on the specific field you are looking for. I just came back from taking a look at the copy at the library and huge is a whee bit of an understatement. The edition that I had wasn't the latest one which contained a chapter on robotics but still the amount of information is vast.

[JamesCH95]

Last year we tried to do an arm design with Potentiometers... it can be very dangerous. If the pot decides to come loose (as will happen in competition) and "wraps around" the arm thrashed violently and almost caused severe injury on more than one occasion. I don't know if that was an inherit hardware or software flaw, but I would not recommend it. As for the load bearing aspect, we used 1/2" hardened Steel dead-axles where the arm sprockets had the bearings pressed into them. That part of the design worked well and was incredibly rugged and compact. Good luck with you design experiments!