This is the process of a lot of prototyping and hard work. The claw works really well and it is easy to operate. The claw is on a wrist that gives us about 200 degrees of motion and it uses penumatics for the open/close operation.
This is one awesome claw design. However are you afraid of it popping the inner tube competition during competition?
This isn’t the final product. This is what the kids hand cut and fabricated in the machine shop, but we plan on re-making this to be a little more precise and clean. Enjoy.
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We tested it and we haven’t done any damage to any of the tubes so far. The ends of the claws are rounded so there shouldn’t be any popping. We did test the gripper holding on the tube in many different orientations and everything seemed to be okay.
Wow that looks awesome, i cant wait to see the full thing at NJ:)
Can’t see the bottom part of the claw but do you guys have the same type of piece on the other side? If yes, how easy is it to pick up the innertube from the floor?
The reason I am asking this is because, we had a similar design at the beginning of the season, then we scrapped it because it would be hard for the drivers to stand behind the driver station and line up with any tube that they can’t see. But who knows, some teams do magic. =)
The bottom piece is slightly different than the top piece. It is designed so the gripper can scoop under the tube and pick it up pretty easily. Like you said, its not easy to pick up off of the floor with the top piece design so we had to make the necessary changes to make it easier. It seems to be working well, but we still have some further testing to do.
BTW, the claw itself is only 2lbs. I am pretty sure that the whole gripper was only about 4~5 lbs.
Sweet.
We actually can score quite consistantly, the claw can also pull the tubes off the rack without much diffficulty. Now. all that’s left is to clean up the edges and make it look purty!
1403!!
Videos? It looks good.
looks like a lot of weight for a mechanisim that has to manipulate such a light weight object.
It actually isn’t too heavy, but we did lighten the mechanism to be even less heavy by drilling a lot of speed holes in it.
As soon as we can.
The kids have just finished machining/prepping all of the pieces and we should be done assembling the whole thing tomorrow. As soon as we are done, we are going to get some quality time to practice with this puppy.