For this phase of the project, our team needed to design a grasping mechanism for our robotic arm. Each member of our group contributed a proposed design, and we collectively choose which design would work best with the payload from the last phase. It was pivotal to have the previous phase's design in mind as well as the possibility of having it work on other group's payload design. This entailed designing a grasping mechanism that could interact with the concave regions of the payload to create a tight grasp around the object. This would be accomplished by using a servomotor to actuate our mechanism. Our design's were required to have only one degree of freedom to reduce any unintended movement of the mechanism.

We chose this design because it would work most effectively with the payload design that was chosen in the previous phase. This design works via a centrally located servomotor connected to a mechanism that pulls the grasping mechanism inwards towards the payload. As the servomotor rotates, this causes the linkages to rotated inward and slide the grasping mechanism along tracks. This is very efficient because it grasps the payload in between the sliders and evenly distributes the force between both sides. We believe it is best because it uses the motor very efficiently while also having minimal beams to keep things simple. In addition, this design only has one degree of freedom, making it easy to predict its range of motion. The only negative we recognized was the possibility of friction between the tracks and the grasping blocks, but this can be mitigated by using materials with low coefficients of friction.