Mechanical Design Portfolio
The final iteration had a wooden chassis with two aluminum scissor lifts driven by motors and worm gears. Each wheel was driven by a continuous servo, with left and right wheel sets controlled together for steering. On top of the robot is a grabbing arm controlled by a limited-motion servo, used to pull down the top of the teeter totter.
SolidWorks screenshots show the operation of the robot: on the left, both scissor lifts are fully extended. To pass over a wall, the car could rest its front bumper on top of the wall, retract the front wheel base, as shown on the right, and drive forward until the wall was between the wheel bases. The front wheels would then descend, the rear wheels retract, and the car could pull forward to rest on the rear bumper. Finally, the rear wheel base would extend and the car could drive freely.
Earlier parts made from aluminum and laser-cut acrylic.
Remote-Controlled Robot
In ENGS 76: Machine Engineering, three teammates and I designed and fabricated a robot able to navigate an obstacle course that included a maze, teeter totter, lateral slope, and a 12" vertical wall. We were limited to two motors and four continuous motion servos, two limited motion servos, hardware, and a set of spur gears. All other components were machined from aluminum, plywood, or acrylic stock.
Our approach was to create a specialized wall-climbing machine and to approach other obstacles as a wall; for instance, we climbed over the walls of the maze rather than navigating on the ground. We created a servo-driven machine on two wheel bases which could retract and extend using scissor lifts on a screw drive. We also included a grabbing arm to pull down the edge of the teeter totter. We created several iterations of the chassis of our vehicle in different proportions and materials, first aluminum, then acrylic, and finally plywood.
My major contributions were the design of the chassis, machining of the aluminum screw drives for both scissor lifts, and the CAD assembly and simulation of the final machine.