VEX Robot - Moving Crane Grabber

At the Computer Science Club at the Canadian International School of Hong Kong, we procured VEX IQ robot kits via our school’s procurement system in Grade 10 in an effort to improve our programming skills via a project in Grade 11. Throughout that year, I began by following the kit’s instructions to build a crane grabber. This included constructing the base and crane, as well as coding the servo motors in RobotC (a C based language) for swivelling the crane grabber and the grabber itself. Once completed, I attempted to remove the base and build a moving platform for it. The extreme weight of the crane proved to be an overwhelming engineering challenge. An attempt to replicate the steering of a conventional vehicle showed that an axle controlled by a central servo motor was not feasible due to its inability to support the crane’s weight. Therefore many designs were trialled before one was settled on that yielded the best result within the available time-frame. The final product is showcased in the video below.