For my Mechatronics class my team and I were assigned to build an automated can crusher. The crusher is to be loaded with 10 uncrushed cans and then output 10 crushed cans in under 2 minutes. The following video demonstrates our can crushing device.
Our team still needs to solve the issue of loading cans into our crusher through some sort of hopper device, but for now, we are satisfied with our can crusher.
A few tech specs:
6″ throw, 1.5″ bore diameter pneumatic Cylinder
Operating Pressure: 100 psi
Control is achieved using a 4-way solenoid valve paired with a L298 based motor driver.
An Arduino Mega provides the smarts.
Over the past month or so I have been working on building a painting robot. This robot will be able to paint a wall using spray paint in a graffiti-esque manner. My initial inspiration, and thus similarity in design, was a robot called Hektor. Hektor was a graffiti robot built as a project by Jürg Lehni with help from Uli Franke at écal, the University of Art and Design Lausanne. More about Hektor here and écal here.
I just finished some testing on my spray paint can holding/spraying mechanism. The video below shows the second test of the spraying mechanism. In the initial setup the servo used to depress the spray nozzle couldn’t provide enough downward force all the time. The second video shows an attempt at getting around this issue by the servo pressing on the nozzle from a different direction.
Second Spray Test:
Initial Spray Test:
I will probably end up modifying the spraying mechanism further so it is less of a hack to get it to depress the spray can nozzle.
The following pictures show the can holder and spraying mechanism during the build:
I’ve also finished building motors to move the spray can around. When I get time, I’ll post something about the motor build.
As part of a class project, for Micro/Nano Robotics, we’re building an ornithoper. The above video shows an example of the flapping mechanism.
For this project we will be building an ornithopter that uses passive wing pitching to increase the amount of total lift. As the video shows, the flapping mechanism is complete. The wings should be built within the next few days.
We’ve mounted Stairbot in a hanging position so we could perform some testing on its legs. We’ve discovered some issues with our servos, and we keep blowing some of them up. We’re not sure if it’s an issue with the design, or if the servos are bad.
Friday afternoon we were able to complete the first of four legs of Stairbot. We were hoping to complete more than that, but, we currently only have enough servos for one leg and we’re waiting on the rest to arrive. However, in the meantime, we will work on being able to control this one leg so when we add more, it will be easy to develop gaits. To control Stairbot, we’re going to be tethering an Arduino to a computer for extra computational power, to allow us to perform inverse kinematic calculations.
I’m in a class called Introduction to Robotics. In this class we have labs where we make robots to do things using the LEGO NXT Mindstorms kits. (Part of) Our current assignment is to make a robot that can follow a fairly complex line. In our team, I’m the Mechanical Engineer, so I built the robot. Our Computer Scientist, Rich, wrote a really sweet line following program based on the general algorithm our group came up with.
I’m not going to reveal the black magics he used in his program, or our general algorithm, but, from the video you can probably deduce the general idea. The line it follows is complex, containing both a 90 degree bend and a hairpin. As you can also see in the video, the robot could follow this line indefinitely until its batteries die.
Last night we we3re able to complete our dynamics project. Barring any significant failures in testing the device, we won’t be making any additional changed to it.
We rectified all of the issues that we discovered in our first design review. We lacked all of the controls that we needed as well as having some stability issues. We added a control bar and fixed up the sliding mechanism. The mechanism works basically perfectly.
