ARC Robotics Competition
With five other students, I helped design and build a 20 lb robot, roughly 0.6 by 0.6 m, for a competition that came down to picking up cubes and placing them precisely. My main piece was the two-degree-of-freedom wrist. It rolls continuously through 360 degrees on a slip ring and pitches 180 degrees, which gives the end effector a full hemisphere to work in. I iterated the gear train to cut backlash and stiffen it, added on-axis encoding for control, and built in hardstops and active cooling so it could survive a stalled motor during testing.
I drew the parts to GD&T, cut them on the waterjet, milled and tapped them against a fixture plate, pressed in the bearings on the lathe and mill, and assembled the wrist myself. The electronics mount was topology-optimized in nTop. The wider robot used slip rings on the turret yaw and wrist roll for continuous rotation, three passive omni-wheels for odometry, and a suction end effector.
