This project was started on February of 2019 with an aim to compete on the ASME Student Design Competition held in Michigan State University. However, due to some issues, we had to forego the competition and organize our own competition among the teams that were orginally planned to attend the competition.
Initial Thought Processes and Prototypes
Like every engineering desgin process, the first step was to gather ideas based on the goal. The designs that we agreed on were a robotic arm mechanism, and the “bucket” mechanism (our final design). After looking around the web and visualizing the scenario, robotic arm was eliminated. Considering the time we had, we were not sure we could pull that off. So, we went with the bucket design. Below are the drawings Henry sketched as we thought of the constraints.
Prototypes
We obviously had CAD designs made up, but we still wanted to see our initial design in action and find any faults and inefficiencies. We used laser to cut the card boards (because, why not?) and hot glued them to create the masterpiece (pictured below).
Fabrication
We used water jet to cut the base plate. Maginificent piece of equipment :)Test Run with Base and Motors
Competition
Round 1: One word: Chaos.
Round 2: