Week 5

Progress

This week a second prototype of the block clamp was constructed, and mounted onto the robot arm. Additionally, an initial test was done to determine the plausibility of using dresser drawer tracks for moving the robot arm.

Challenges

After mounting the block clamp onto the robot arm, it was found that the rack and pinion track was not long enough to extend the robot arm to the Jenga tower, so additional track was added. The robot base, a structure onto which the robot arm and the stepper motors will be mounted, has yet to be designed. The structure will need to be sturdy enough to support rapid forward/back movement of the robot arm. Additionally, home locating buttons will need to be incorporated to determine and initialize the position of the stepper motors. There will be a home button to indicate the initial position of the arm height and arm length stepper control motors. These will need to be mounted somehow to the robot arm and base.

Action Items

• build a functional prototype of a system to control the z-axis movement of the robot arm