Tidying is not my strong point, as seen by my desk and desktop, so this challenge was a little unfamiliar to me! Never the less, poli:droid doesn’t need to fall into bad habits too, so we needed to design an attachment to help tidy!
As seen in our last post, we decided to keep this challenge ‘relatively simple’ picking up an individual block at a time, using a claw approach.
Being relatively new to Fusion 360, and an impending deadline, we decided designing a claw from scratch may have been a little ambitious so decided to head over to the wonderful place which is Thingsiverse to find one to modify into our design.
After scrolling through various pages, we decided to go for the ‘Vector Arm by Rubis Technologies‘. Fully open, it could extend 90mm, more than enough to collect the blocks!
This would then be mounted to gatherDock, on a frame with a servo, so we could raise and lower the arm. Giving us the ability to stack the blocks if we wanted to!
The Design
The design was relatively simple in comparison to some of the other challenges we had faced… *cough* Drive & Steering, we simply needed to mount the claw on a pivot so that it could change elevation. With this in mind, I came up with the below! The base plate of the arm was mounted to a frame, which enables it to be elevated using a servo mounted on the outside. The frame was constructed using support beams, to reduce the print time, but enable a strong and rigid structure to hold the arm securely. I also added a spot on the side for visionContainer (the pixyCam2 attachment) to enable the tasks to be completed autonomously.
Assembling The Arm
The arm was very simple to assemble! We made a few adjustments, changing the screws from plastic to caps to using actual locking bolts. We also greased up the entire mechanism to make it easier for the servo to control. To power the arm itself, we used a futaba s3003 servo, giving us 180° of rotation. To elevate the arm, we used metal geared 9g servo, similar, the same make as used in steering. This seemed to give us enough power to elevate it, however, for future iterations, a stronger servo would definitely be useful!
The Final Assembly
After a few failed 3d prints (as always closer to a deadline!) we finally had an assembled gatherDock. We had enough range of motion to be able to collect and stack the blocks, ideal for the challenge!
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