MAE3 Robotic Arm

My team of four had to build a robot that could pick up rings and place them on the higher rungs of a 3-foot model of UCSD's Sun God statue, starting from inside a 10-inch cube. Reaching the top rungs meant roughly tripling our height after the start.

I led the mechanical design, centered on the primary extension mechanism: a rack and pinion with a 2:1 reduction, laser-cut acrylic gears and walls, and a bent sheet metal base. Packing the rack along the cube's diagonal gave me 11 inches of travel (with a good amount of tolerance) while still stowing legally, and the mechanism reached 28 inches of vertical extension while carrying the ring load.

I also developed the team's top-level assembly in Fusion 360, as well as most of our fabrication, documentation, and hand calculations.