Skystone Gripper Version 2

By Justin

Task: Design an Intake Wheel

The older iteration of the gripper wheel

Last season, we designed a ninjaflex gripper for Icarus, our World championship robot. This season, we are experimenting with different intake designs. One of our intake designs is Aaron's Super Cool Gripper, which uses the ninjaflex gripper wheels we designed. The problem with this system is that the wheels are very large, and increase the total size of the intake system. In order to shrink the size of the intake, we need to design smaller wheels that will still be able to grip to the side of the stones. We also combined the design of this gripper with the Pivoting Accelerated User-Friendly Locker (P.A.U.L) so the new intake design uses the new gears on the combination of the existing gripper designs.

Our design consists of a central hub with 8 short flaps attached around it. The design uses similar flaps to last season's design, but there is no ring to support them and the length is much shorter. The width was 2mm, with the circles at the end being 4mm in diameter. When we printed this design the flaps were not stiff enough to maintain grip on the stones. In our second iteration of the gripper wheel we increased the width of the flaps to 3mm, keeping the circle diameters 4mm. We did this to create stronger flaps that would provide more force against the sides of the stones. In addition to this, we also added curves on the edge between the flaps and the central hub to provide more support to the flaps. These two changes made the flaps much stiffer, so now there is much less force required to maintain grip on the stones.

The newer version of the gripper wheel

Next steps:

We need to test this design on an actual intake system. We have a design that currently has last seasons gripper wheels on it. We need to swap the old grippers with our new design, and adjust the size of the gripper to accommodate the smaller wheels.