Swinging Gripper

The swinging gripper project is a staple of Carnegie Mellon University's course 24-370: Design I (for Mechanical Engineers).

In this project, I led a team of three other students to design, build, and test a functional gripper assembly. Our goal was to design a lightweight gripping mechanism within challenging constraints on geometry, materials, loading, workspace, and budget. We also used conceptualization methods, simple models, analytical methods, CAD software, and specialized analysis tools to iterate over our design to improve performance.

Specifically, our task was to clamp an abnormally-shaped solid aluminum object such that it could be raised on a swinging pendulum arm to a height of approximately 3 feet (the arm being parallel to the ground), released, caught, and placed back in its at-rest position without the object moving more than 0.100" in any direction.

Our team successfully completed the task on both testing days, one of only 6 teams to do so.

For a full report of the project, please see the included PDF below.

A summary of our design can be found in Section 2, along with screenshots from CAD. Hand calculations and FEA results can be found in Section 5.

For the project's addendum, please see the included PDF below.

A summary of our iterative process can be found in Section 2, along with screenshots from CAD. Technical drawings and a list of components can be found in Section 3.