pic: IFI's New Vex Robot

[JVN]

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[JVN]

More info, pics and videos:
VexLabs

[Clark Gilbert]

Originally Posted by JVN

More info, pics and videos:
VexLabs

Looks awesome. The perfect gift for that lazy college kid in your family!

[Arefin Bari]

w00t ... I see those sexy Omni wheels. Can't wait till the new version of vex kit comes out.

Question for you John...

How many kits did you guys use to make that robot?

[JVN]

Originally Posted by Arefin Bari

w00t ... I see those sexy Omni wheels. Can't wait till the new version of vex kit comes out.

Question for you John...

How many kits did you guys use to make that robot?

The omni wheels will be part of a seperate accessory pack, being introduced in August. I don't know anything about a new kit version.

Kits kinda blur together... we've got lots of surplus components lying around.
It contains 6 motors, which is 2 kits worth.

[Francis-134]

Wow, pretty cool dude. Encoders, omni-wheels, chain/sprockets. I can't wait till August.

[sanddrag]

Simply amazing. Very nice job. With the beer and all now I suppose you can market this as a father-son project! What better way to get dad involved! j/k LOL. Anyway, a bottle is very heavy and it sure as heck isn't the easiest thing to open so I think you guys did a fantastic job.

[John Neun]

Wow. Beer AND Robots. Nice job John! Reverse entropy: all aspects of life combine into a single continuum!

[Conor Ryan]

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

[Sean Schuff]

Post assembly instructions and programming! I'm not going to reinvent the wheel on this one - it looks like you pretty much nailed it. The only improvement I see making is the ability to open the fridge door and grab it from the bottom shelf.

Very nice.

Sean

p.s. I'll watch for this to show up on the next episode of the Simpsons. Homer would LOVE it!

[Elgin Clock]

Got any good detailed pics or vid of the actual opening mechanism?
The vid is a bit blurry, and I"m guessing that was the hardest part of all the steps?
I wonder how much force it takes to open a bottle cap...

[tiffany34990]

sweet!! don't we all wish to have a surplus of VEX parts just lying around...

hmmm so we all can get really lazy now when it comes to partying... nice job as usual...

[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