Intake Development:
Our intake mechanism has undergone many iterations to reach its current state. Our early iterations were heavily inspired by this mechanism used on actual highways:
This style of reorientation was pursued for about the first week of build season, with lots of testing of specific geometry to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Our earliest tests were posted early in the thread through this video:
Despite showing lots of promise initially, this concept was eventually dropped once early CAD was done for it and the OTB linkages for it looked like this:
While testing the “Cone Logic Gate” we were also developing several end effectors intended to be used with a hand off system. The most promising prototype was this:
This prototype taught us how well grabbing the cone by its tip using rollers worked, which proved very important for our current design.
After we dropped the passive reorienting design and had settled on robot architecture which favored a system which acted as both an intake and end effector, we had to come up with something completely different than our early prototypes. Eventually we came up with the idea to use horizontal rollers to act as a top roller for the cube and a pincher for the cone. We initially tested with just rollers, but found that the cone wouldn’t make it all the way to the pinching rollers. Our solution to this problem was adding polybelt between the wheels to push the cone past the dead zone. The first iteration of this concept looked like this:
The prototype worked even better than expected and met the constraint of being able to work off of both sides of the robot, so we decided to model a more finalized version. The first iteration of CAD looked like this:
It did everything we wanted it to do, but weighed 11lbs, well over our 5lb goal, so it underwent substantial weight loss programs to get down to just over 6lbs.
This was the first high fidelity version of the intake we designed. After testing we were pretty happy with how it was working, but found that it needed a way to ensure that the wheels didn’t contact the ground, and that the wrist mounting point needed to be raised to allow the cone to pass through. The iteration currently on the robot looks like this:
Videos of some of our prototypes can be found here:
