Dragonfly
Dragonfly was the third iteration of our robot designed for the Power Play season, compacted into a 12″×12″ mecanum drivetrain and utilizing a countersprung virtual four-bar linkage for adaptable adjustment of scoring heights. The compliant intake components were custom silicone-molded using an open-source intake generator we built, OpenMold (Link). The odometry pods used for localization are retractable, since they can get caught on indents in the field during scoring and get damaged.
The active claw mechanism was the hardest part of the robot to design. Since we wanted to apply the touch-and-go principle to picking up cones, I built the claw around three servos. It featured custom silicone compliant wheels for intake, driven by linkage arms to grab the element. The virtual 4-bar couldn't bear the claw's load, even after cutting the claw down to two servos, so I moved the compliant intake onto the drivetrain itself and switched to a fixed top-grabbing claw. That also allowed a switch from servos to DC motors which gave significantly more raw power and faster scoring cycles.