Quadcopter Universal Gripper Accessory

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

My accessory is a universal gripper inspired by the project by Cornell and U. Chicago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d4f8fEysf8
The design also includes modified landing gear with retracting legs (powered by a motor and two wires acting on a living hinge) so that the landing gear does not interfere with the gripper during use.
It is designed to be printed on an Objet printer.
Designed in Autodesk Fusion 360, with imported geometry from Autodesk Project Dreamcatcher. Fusion's robust support for importing and manipulating mesh geometry was key to executing the design.

The gripper is a soft balloon shape filled with granular material. To pick up an object, the quadcopter lowers onto the object and presses the object into the soft rubber. A pump at the base of the gripper arm sucks the air out of the balloon, stiffening the granular material and locking the object in place. The quadcopter can then take off and carry the object to the desired location, releasing it by releasing the vacuum.

Using this design, the quadcopter can pick up an unlimited variety of objects with ease. While this universality makes it useful in numerous applications, the drone is intended for use in construction and repair in dangerous conditions and at tall heights. When a worker drops a tool, the drone can retrieve it quickly and safely no matter the shape of the tool or the location it landed in. This saves time, money, and most importantly lives.

The design leverages the strengths of 3D Printing in each of its components.
1/2/3:
The articulating landing gear uses the Objet Connex's soft tango and hard vero materials to create a multimaterial print with a living hinge. The flexibility of the hinge can be adjusted to an optimal stiffness by modifying it's percent composition of vero and tango using the Objet's ability to "mix" resins during a print.
2/3:
Throughout the design, assembly simplification is used to reduce manufacturing costs. 3D Printing, with its ability to manufacture trapped volumes, unusual structures and multiple materials, was used to combine the pump's tubing with the gripper arm, the soft rubber "balloon" with the arm, and the articulating ends with the base of the landing gear. By combining these parts, less parts and labor go into assembly. Additionally, the structural integrity and the weight of the design are both improved by the removal of joints.
1/2:
Autodesk's Project Dreamcatcher, a generative design tool for topological optimization, was used to create the branching structure of the gripper arm. The design reduces weight and material as much as possible while ensuring the part is stiff enough to sustain reasonable loads. The organic branching design is much lighter than equivalent designs that are manufacturable with traditional methods.
1/2:
The granular material typically used in a universal gripper is coffee grounds. For this design, small particles are printed using the Objet. With 3D Printing, the microstructure of the particles as well as the composition of a hard and soft material can be manipulated to create optimal characteristics and improve performance over the traditionally used coffee grounds.

The power of 3D Printing is not achieving printability, but surpassing printability and creating a design that truly benefits from the strengths of additive manufacturing. With the universal gripper I have created a design that is practical and impactful while truly benefiting from 3D Printing and excelling over a comparable traditionally manufacturable design