Overview:
This is the final project for a class called Biomechatronics and lasted six weeks. I worked with another student to design and assemble a motorized gripper that can pick up and move an egg to a specified location. My responsibility was developing concept designs for the gripper and control mechanisms, modeling, prototyping and programming. Our design won the race for moving three eggs without breaking any in the shortest time among the ten groups.

Mechanical Design:
The base arm with two degrees of freedom were assembled and can be controlled to move using a slider potentiometer and a rotational potentiometer. The gripper design utilized four-bar linkage mechanism in order to pick up objects with various sizes. We left rectangular slot shown in the Solidworks model so that a servo motor could be secured into the slot and connected to one gear. When the servo motor rotated, the paired gears rotated to close the gripper. Four gripping pieces were designed to fit the curvature of an egg and 3D printed to attach to the existing claw.

Control Design:
We hot glued a force sensor onto the inner surface of the gripper for feedback control. A flex sensor was connected so that a user with the flex sensor attached to his finger would intuitively grip to initiate the robot grip. If the force sensor reached a certain threshold, it would stop the motion of the claw. Returning the flex sensor to an unflexed position would cause the claw to rotate back to its starting position. These controls enabled the gripper to grasp an object without breaking it.

Skills:
CAD Modeling (Solidworks); Mechatronics; Rapid Prototyping; Programming (C for Arduino);