Our final mechanism holding an object
The goal of our project was to design a robotic end effector system capable of automatically packing orders in a warehouse environment.
In a warehouse, manual order packing is inefficient and accounts for a large portion of the operating costs and labour. An automatic system can reduce the costs while improving efficiency, consistency and reliability in the packing process.
Our system uses a custom-designed mechanical gripper mounted to a robotic Q-Arm device which is controlled by a software system that manages order packing operations and tracking logs.
Our design process began by brainstorming and comparing several mechanical gripper concepts that would meet the requirements of this project.
During this stage we considered the following main constraints:
Final sketch of our mechanism
Based on these constraints, we selected a design containing a 4:1 gear ratio and a linear rack-and-pinion mechanism. This approach allowed for a high clamping force and was relatively simple to print.
After initial sketch concepts were created, we designed a CAD assembly of the mechanism. This CAD assembly was then repeatedly iterated and tested until we achieved proper tolerances and meshing between parts.
Once the mechanical system was functional, we started on the software development. We created flowcharts of the main program and divided it into multiple modular functions. These functions were then assigned to team members who were responsible for their creation and testing.