What is CAD?
CAD stands for Computer-Aided Design. It is an awesome technology that lets us model our robot or mechanisms in software without the need for physical hardware. Once our model is tested and we are sure it works, we can either assemble it with actual parts or have it custom made out of plastic. When we integrate CAD into our hardware planning, we can drastically improve our efficiency by never having to do things twice.
You can see a gallery of some of our models here.
The above drawing shows our very first robot design.
This was an idea we had early in the season. The idea was to grip the glyphs with conveyor belts. The belts would open at the bottom to accept a cube, then close and lift it to the top. Once we had it at the desired height we would push it out and place it.
We had originally planned to use Mecanum Wheels on our robot. They are cool because they can direct power both forwards and sideways at the same time. This means that when you have 4 of the wheels with their own motors, you can drive in any direction. We later decided against this because of the large size of the wheels, their cost, and the number of motors they require.
This is our custom built chain tensioner. We made this with the goal of mounting it to our robot to eliminate any slack in our chains. It is assembled by printing the top and bottom parts, then inserting springs into holes built in to the part. Once you do this, it can be mounted to the robot. The spring pushes the guide against the chain, eating up all available slack.
We made these claws to attach to the end of our glyph arm. They are 3D printed and mounted to a gearbox to give us a good grip on the cubes. Because we needed to save weight, we used a shape optimization study to remove any material we didn’t need. We determined that with their current shape, they can take 20 lbs. of force from the motor before breaking.