Björn Bouwer, Nico Hochgürtel, Adrian Lenkeit
We set ourselves the goal of constructing a robotic arm that can move sensitive parts. Our first robotic arm was based on Lego Technic. It had a simple grabber and we controlled it using a program written in Microsoft C#. However, the grabber struggled with some objects due to its very smooth surface. Therefore we built a new grabber consisting of a balloon filled with sand. The balloon becomes stiff when the air is sucked out. The new grabber design required an improved robotic arm as the initial design was not able to push onto the object with sufficient force to pick it up. Therefore we built a new wooden robotic arm with a large base plate, which was able to push the balloon down effectively. The new robotic arm combined with the balloon-based vacuum grabber works very well.
