Our design philosophy was to have a fast and simple robot that could score several balls at a time at a high rate. For the subsystems I was responsible for, I made several design choices for to meet that goal.

I chose to a 4-bar linkage lift for its simplicity, but it required a 2-stage gearbox to function. I designed and assembled the lifter and its gearbox, going through several iterations to decrease weight and make the gearbox as fast as possible.

We designed a wide gripper that could hold 3 balls at once, but this required close alignment so they would all fit into the hole side by side. To achieve this, I wrote semi-autonomous software that sensed reflective tape patterns on the floor and allowed the driver to align the robot with the press of a button.

Our robot performed great in the competition and was the highest-scoring robot in the class!

In our final report, I wrote sections detailing our mechanical design decisions and the calculations that we made to validate them.