MAE3 Robot Arm

The year I took MAE3 (UCSD's Introduction to Mechanical Design course), we were tasked with building a robot that could pick up rings and place them on a model UCSD's Sun God statue. Biggest issue? Our robots had to fit within a 10" cube at the start and extend ~3' upwards to reach the higher rungs of the statue to score maximum points.

I led the mechanical design for our four-person team, with my specific focus being the "vertical extension mechanism." I designed a rack-and-pinion system with a 2:1 gear reduction, laser-cut the acrylic gears, and fabricated a bent sheet metal base to keep the footprint compact. The final mechanism extended to 28" vertically from an 11" footprint (staged diagonally to fit in the cube) while maintaining structural integrity under worst-case load conditions. I also developed our team's full top-level assembly in Fusion360. Check out one of our final presentations, it has GIFs of the component I designed working with exploded views, etc. Link below!

Skills

Fusion 360 · AutoCAD · Laser Cutting · Sheet Metal Fabrication · Mechanical Design · Gear Design