During my four years of high school I was the Chief Engineering Officer on our First Tech Challenge team. I was in charge of brainstorming designing and constructing our robots. I was able to develop my ability to solve open ended problems. I improved my design process to be able to overcome unforeseen difficulties and come up with alternative solutions.
With one year of experience under my belt I was able to comfortable start the robot designing process. The main actuating arm is a four bar linkage to keep the grabber perpendicular to the ground.
For this design I tired to improve the efficiency of our rover by using spinning wheels to pick up the game objects, then use a extrusion lift mechanism to raise multiple objects to the correct height.
Now confident with using an extrusion lift and the Mecanum wheels I implemented these key elements in the first design. The largest challenge with this robot was creating a grippy enough claw.
Learning from the difficulties of using a claw to pick up a game piece grippy wheels where implemented to grab pieces while a separate claw lifted the piece into place.