Testing ...

As you can see, our robot is almost fully constructed and we are starting to test it.
Here we were testing if BarRD keeps its equilibrium while holding a bottle of juice.

Arm 2.0 - the final version

Until now, you have seen the gripper and the "wrist". After putting the two of them together this is what we got:

Working ...

Arm 1.2

A week ago we had the bottle grabber, but we also needed something similar to a wrist. This is why we built a new part. The following pictures show the gripper (on the left side) along with the newly constructed part that rotates the entire arm (on the right side).

You can see how the arm moves to the left or to the right, depending on the direction in which the motor moves.

The robot

In a previous post I told you that we have printed 3d parts for our robot and I showed you a few of them, but you don't know yet how BarRD looks like. So it is time for a picture with it:

As you can see, we used as platform an IRobot Create, and above it we built a metal support. The lego  motor moves the threaded rod, which will move the arm up and down.

We have the arm!!!

Now, when we finally finished the construction of the arm, it is time to tell you more about its history.
First of all, we created an arm using lego parts and then we wrapped adherent material around the claws.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the best solution because it was frail, and we weren't sure it could always  support the weight of a bottle. And since we didn't want to risk we decided to build another arm. With help from our coordinator, we now have a more robust bottle grabber which looks like this:

As you can see, it is mostly done using 3d printed parts and a lego motor which moves the threaded rod, and in turn it makes the claw move.

3D Printer

For the past few weeks we projected and printed several parts for our robot using the 3D Printer: Orca.
And, since it was (and will be) really helpful for us, I thought it would be nice to post something about it.
Here is the 3D printer Orca v042 working:

and some 3d printed parts: