This week was the first week we began working on our project. After our proposal presentations, we received some feedback about our confidence level with the robotics portion. We are excited to tackle the challenges, but as we mentioned in our proposal, we are definitely not familiar with robotics. We (Maxine and I) wanted to start planning the 2DOF XY movement portion while doing some more research into the gripping mechanism. (Jiaqi had suggested a prismatic joint for our claw for resistor pickup.) As for the 2DOF, we looked primarily into claw machines, and found quite a few tutorials.

Aluminum which was cited as a part on most of these tutorials are quite expensive, so we had to do a little more research. We were looking at this tutorial: https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Claw-Machine/ . And beyond custom building our solution, we also looked into readymade XY tables. The prices were very high though. Prices ranged from $300-700, depending on size in one of the sites we saw. So It doesn’t seem quite possible for us to buy an off the shelf solution.

So in order to actually start composing a real parts list, we decided to check out some parts from the 18-500 inventory. This included the RPi and the camera. With this, we were able to get some dimension estimates and have more concrete numbers to work with.