Roller Claw Proof of Concept

By Fernando and Ren

Task: Experiment with Claw Designs

Today we built a proof of concept for a roller claw concept that we came up with. This claw took inspiration from a passive rubber band pincer gripper designed by a team on the unofficial FTC Discord server. It also took inspiration from a previous roller/beater intake designed by Iron Reign for the Relic Recovery season (see below).

To create this claw, we used surgical tubing as our elastic/tensioner and custom NinjaFlex TPU rollers. After testing, we noticed that the surgical tubing did not provide enough tension to properly grip samples or specimens. Additionally, we acknowledged that while all elastics will start to loosen, the surgical tubing would undergo this process at a quicker rate than other options. On a more positive note, while the custom rollers did unfortunately come out bad due to using wet filament, both the material and roller profile seem promising for their intended purpose. It did need a slight increase in stiffness, so we plan to increase either the wall thickness or the sparse infill percentage.

In the future, we hope to test extension springs as our elastic instead of surgical tubing. We believe this will be more durable in the long run and will provide enough tension in order to grip the specimens and samples. We also want to increase the structural stability due to this proof of concept being a very quick and janky design/prototype. An example of this issue is the claw halves not having any physical limits therefore making the whole assembly too wobbly. With future improvements, we are hopeful that this claw has potential to be an excellent and versatile intake option for the season.