Marble Catch and Sort Mechanism
ME350: Junior Design Project | January 2019 - May 2019

This is a mechanism I designed for ME350, the second Design and Manufacturing course in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. The objective is to catch marbles from two chutes on the playing field and, depending on the color, throw it into either a basket or a net. The key design elements were minimizing the moment of inertia/mass of the mechanism to allow faster acceleration and keeping the transmission angle of the four-bar linkage close to 90° to maximize power transfer. I wrote a full state machine as well as a custom PID controller to control the mechanism, which runs on an Arduino Uno. This mechanism won 1st place in Winter 2019 with a score of 1987.

Please view a full run of the game here: Final Run

---