pic: IFI's New Vex Robot

Originally Posted by artdutra04

http://www.vexlabs.com/vex-ribbon-cutter.shtml
This one has some pretty sweet Vex tank treads and chain-driven, multi-stage elevator...

I wonder if they'll be unvieling anything soon

why else would they make a ribbon cutting robot

[Jay Trzaskos]

The Ribbon bot was for the opening of Radio Shacks largest store. At least i think thats what John told me. There was definitely something about ribbons, scissors, and flagship store. Oh well, props on the awesome design. Can't wait to get my own Vex kit sometime.

JT
229

[Chris]

Originally Posted by cdr1122334455

how many spills did you have during testing? loose any equipment because of it? Also what was your inspiration?

Okay lots of questions.

First off the challenge for this robot came directly from Radio Shack they specifically requested that we design a robot to open and pour a "Malt" Beverage. The challenge of course fell to Innovation First's new engineer JVN.. and myself the lowly intern.

Inspiration for the different parts came from various places. The gripper was inspired by FRC teams who have used similar roller claw setups to grab balls, floppies, and inner tubes. If you look carefully at the pouring motion accomplished by an uneven four bar linkage you can see that the bottle tips, and the glass is brought up at an angle. This is of course inspired by the accepted correct way to pour our specific beverage of choice.

We had some very interesting moments during testing, one came during a test of the robot driving into the "beverage" and grabbing it. The beverage became so shaken up; that when I grabbed the top of the long neck bottle to remove it from the gripper, the bottom of bottle blew out sending glass and "Foamy Liquid" everywhere. The rest of that week while doing real work that was all we could smell.

Elgin, Opening the bottle was without a doubt the most daunting part of this challenge. The original opener was a turreting pneumatically driven opener made entirely out of vex components, which worked, but was far too picky to meet our reliability requirement. The second one which you can see in the video is a commercial can opener driven off a double 5:25 reduction from a standard vex motor in a 2 bar linkage setup. I don't have the exact numerical force value required to open a bottle, but our opener set up is so powerful that one time when it jammed it torqued the vex steel shaft clean apart.

Any other questions feel free to ask, This was an amazingly fun project to work on, and just one of the cool things I’ve got to do this summer as IFI's intern.

Chris Carnevale
Innovation First Intern

[JVN]

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Thanks,
John