Project - Meeting 3

Date: 22-05-2012
Attendants: Jeppe, Thomas & Stefan
Duration: 2 hours

Goal

• Design and build the stacking robot
• Design and build the gripping robot

Plan

• We will be discussing the layout of the two types of robos once again and change some details from last time we met.
• Modify the already existing design.

Results

Stacking robot discussion:

The robot design requires us to use very long tracks which Lego unfortunately does not produce. An alternative could be to turn the motors around, which would make the robot shorter and possibly able to support the shorter tracks.

We are considering putting tires underneath the robot side by side with the tracks in order to assist it when driving up the ramp. This is because we are worried that there will not be enough friction when only using tracks.

Grapping robot discussion:

We discussed the possible solutions and difficulties with gripping an element. It was important for us that the gripping mechanism on the robot should be very simple and only require one motor to grip and release. The item to be gripped should also be easy to pick up and not require the robot to spend a lot of processing power to be in the right position in order to pick it up. After our discussion we came up with the following design:

Conclusion

We did not settle on a final design for the robots, but got a good discussion going on the requirements for the robots. We were experimenting with the traction of the slide on the Stacking robot. We did not really  reach a final conclusion on this matter.

We do not want to spend a lot of time building advanced grabbing arms for taking the "object", so we decided to keep the grabbing mechanism and target object very simple.