Pushbutton Pantry

This robot is a pick-and-place machine designed specifically to be mounted to the top of a high standard shelf and to move around hard-to-reach objects of varying size and shape, particularly cans, and deliver them per request to a user standing on the floor. This would be very useful to reduce risk of injury (falling) in any household, but would be especially useful in the house of an elderly or handicapped person who either cannot use a footstool or would be put at great risk in doing so. In addition, it can be used to create a digital catalog of what is in stock and could be programmed to make suggestions based on what is present, be it a recommended recipe to try or a live inventory during grocery shopping. The dexterity of the robot is achieved using a basic H-Bot configuration with inexpensive T-Slot rails and roller carriages, with a Z-carriage driven by a NEMA 17 stepper motor on the effector platform, and a soft, hydraulic balloon-based gripper to grip objects of various size and shapes with little difficulty. The gripper functions by filling a flexible rubber torus, shown on the main effector, with water. The ring fills and compresses any object inside of it, gripping it with a strength proportional to the water pressure used. The rigid outer ring serves as a support for when the inner ring is not inflated to the point of tautness. The advantages of using this system, as compared to a standard gripper, include a higher contact area for greater friction, less dependency on orientation and shape, and a decrease in the number of high precision moving parts. To minimize the amount of tubing required, the pump and reservoir are modeled mounted to the Z-carriage (filleted red block), though due to the incompressibility of water, it could be moved elsewhere as part of a Bowden-style setup. The gripper, as shown, has a clearance of 8.5 inches, allowing it to stack 2 standard sized cans (4 inches) and maintain clearance, as long as it has nothing in its grip. To deliver a package to a user standing on the ground, the robot delivers the object to the right side, which has a separate belt gantry which can move in the Z-axis. When the object is placed on the belt, the entire belt moves down, simultaneously moving the object forward on the belt. When the belt reaches the bottom of the Z-axis, the object can easily be removed by hand, and the robot can continue to either retrieve items or go into a standby mode. The reverse can be performed for putting an object on top of the shelf. To control the robot, an open source board with a large number of stepper drivers could be used. For example, the pump, reservoir, and the belt gantry Z-axis could each be driven by a stepper motor, numbering the present stepper motors at 6. An example board for this application would be a RUMBA controller board, which can drive 6 stepper motors, and can easily store a catalog of positions and descriptions with an SD card. Finally, the board can also accept an LCD screen fairly easily, allowing locations and retrievals to be chosen without an external computer. The total cost of this robot could be as low as $500 as designed. Some parts of this CAD file were provided by McMaster Carr, and were either used unmodified or only slightly modified. Here is a listing of all the parts that were modeled by a distributor: T-Slot Rail: (https://www.mcmaster.com/#60585k113/=19yzt3t) Side-Mount Track Roller Carriage: (https://www.mcmaster.com/#9904k1/=19yzsga) Motor Coupling: (https://www.mcmaster.com/#6208k433/=19xwmzg) Threaded Rod: (https://www.mcmaster.com/#93410a904/=19xwpto) Threaded Rod Nut: (https://www.mcmaster.com/#95066a105/=19ya3qu) All other parts were modeled in Onshape. The Document can be found here: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/c3e3bac8dc71c0720d181569/w/ab9a1502a828820fc01c9ec2/e/9a9d0188812096add923400c RUMBA board: https://reprapchampion.com/products/rumba-atmega2560-reprap-3d-printer-controller-board-for-prusa-i3-kossel?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=googlepla&variant=23593307078&gclid=CIvcxLroi9UCFdOCswodYMgHYg Thank you for reading!