Front Assembly

The main recommendation the 20-21 mechanics team had for us was to improve the front assembly, and more specifically its damping behavior since the robots struggled to catch the ball and the damping behavior was different for each robot. Also, the redesign of the front assembly needs to take modularity into account. Therefore, this year we worked on making a modular front assembly with good, reliable and consistent damping for each robot.

At the beginning of the year, the damping behavior of the 20-21 robots was tested in order to see how well it performed and to be able to compare it to future designs of the front assembly's damping. The results of these tests can be found here (the sponge damping front assemblies are written in black, any other color is one of the future designs). The conclusions which were drawn gave us a list of requirements for the design of the new front assembly:

• Reliable impact absorption: The damping behavior should be the same for every robot, so we need to use materials or devices that perform consistently. The ball should not bounce off too much.
• Design modularity: The entire front assembly should be easy to take out in a single unit or module. In this way, parts can be replaced or repaired easily.
• Rigid design: The front assembly should not be prone to things like loosening screws or other things that wear down easily. Also, parts should stay in place, for example the dribbler motor and the dribbler should always stay parallel to each other. The structure should also be similar for all robots.
• Improved chipper plate positioning: The chipper plate should not stick out too far. Furthermore, a look has to be taken at the materials used for the chipper's plate and arms. These are parts that break quite often in the current design. Also, the chipper plate should stay down when the ball arrives.

Before any concrete design, it is useful to analyze some general techniques and designs that might be applicable for the front assembly. Furthermore, the design is limited to certain dimensions due to the presence of certain parts such as the motors and the middle plate. The conceptualization will consist of several solutions for sub-problems that will correspond to the requirements stated above. First, the available design space will be described as well as the way in which we created more space for the front assembly. Then, the different conceptual designs of the assembly will be discussed. Finally, a morphological diagram will be shown along with the final design choices made based on this diagram.

• Available Design Space
• Conceptual Designs
• Morphological Diagram

This section will explain in detail the design of the new front assembly based on the choices made in the conceptualization section. It is expected that the first couple of iterations will need some modifications once their prototypes have been tested. Therefore, the different iterations until the final one will be described here, along with why certain design choices did not work and how the problems encountered were fixed in order to end up with the final design.

• First Iteration
• Second Iteration
• Final Iteration