The Swinging Gripper

In this project, we built a mechanical gripper. The project requirements dictate that the gripper be placed at the end of a long pendulum that has a motor to mount on. When the motor is turned on, our gripper is required to close, and hold onto a heavy object. The object used can be seen in the picture to the left. It is the silver, snowman shaped object: it has a small base and is easily tipped over. During the process of pick up, we were not allowed to tip over the snowman.

 

The test protocol was as follows: The motor on the rig mount is turned on, allowing the gripper to activate. When gripped, the block underneath the object is removed, and the snowman must remain in place suspended in the air. The pendulum is then moved to horizontal position, and released. It swings for two periods and when placed back at the bottom of the arc, the snowman cannot have slipped more than 0.100 inches.

 

Our design that is detailed below, passed this test.

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In the left picture, the silver box at the top is part of the rig at the end of the pendulum, containing the motor. The device we created are the gears and the claws in black. The design is primarily made out of acrylic because we wanted to use a material that we could rapid prototype with for design iterations.

 

We were given an unchangeable rig and a motor, and expected to build a device that could mount to it, while still passing all the tests. This taught us how to be creative among strict design constraints to make a working product.

 

Teammates: Richard Tang, Maheer Sayeed, and Adam Chung

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