In my final year of school at Thayer I took a mechatronics class that covered mechanism and robotic design frameworks. The final project was to build a “RecycleBot” to compete against classmates to see who could recycle the most cans within an arena. The robot was made with some CNC’d parts, a lot of laser cut wood, and old motors + wheels from an RC car. The RC car hand held controller was used to send motion commands to the vehicle.
This course really emphasized process – we had to maintain diligent notebooks with play by plays of our team meetings and decisions, and perform multiple rounds of trade off studies to make analytical decisions about our design direction.
Ultimately my team settled on a scissor lift design, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake. The scissor lift had very little mechanical advantage, so we had to make a last minute addition of many small springs to help get the lift going. Our team fondly dubbed this robot Icarus, furthering our wing metaphor and acknowledging the inherent folly in our design.
nadav hendel 