Final

Ryan Habermann and Grace MacPherson

Our project was a robotic claw module that was designed to pick up objects of varying sizes and shapes without damaging the object. Our module was one of five others from other students and we would ultimately join modules together. This would lead to the creation of one large robot. We wanted the claw to feature four fingers instead of the basic two. We also wanted it to have a design that was somewhat simple yet creative, so that it could easily be reproduced. To accomplish this feat, we created two separate claws and connected them together through a notch system. The fingers of the claw were powered by servos which provided enough power to grasp objects. On the ends of the fingers we used a rubber foam to make gripping objects easier for the claw. In addition, we incorporated two pressure sensors on the ends of the fingers to sense when the grip strength was excessive. To program the servos and the pressure sensors we used an arduino uno. We then were able to program the exact movements of the claw and at exactly what force to stop applying pressure. We had to create several iterations before our design was complete. We had many failures misunderstood areas of the claw before we fully grasped the concept of simplicity. Through many iterations, we eventually created a functional robotic claw that could grasp objects with ease.