BridgeBot

We elected to utilize a rotating base design, relying on both vertically and horizontally placed custom roller bearings in order to counter the extreme bending moment exerted by our tower design at maximum extension.

We chose a simple box-section tower made from laser-cut 3mm plywood, as it allowed us to iterate quickly, was relatively light weight, and had excellent stiffness according to our analyses and testing.

The Carriage that runs up and down the tower uses a roller system inspired by 3D-printer designs and is raised and lowered using a 3-stage gearbox with a spool and string.

The Arm of our bot is a simple rack and pinion design with a two laser-cut acrylic plates and press-fit cartridge bearings to keep the gears and rollers running smoothly.

Since the given materials were entirely rectilinear, we chose a vise-gripper design as opposed to a more complex parallel linkage. We also made sure our design could accommodate lifting stacks of multiple blocks since that was critical to our overall strategy for the challenge.

A last minute addition, but ultimately crucial to our performance, the electromagnet mounted opposite the gripper allowed our team to leverage the fact that both the PLA and aluminum materials were embedded with high-strength magnets. In competition, our dual-ended arm design allowed us to retrieve materials with both the gripper and the magnet simultaneously, proving to be a significant advantage.