Soccer Ball Shooter
Team Members: Mike Eller, Matt Carnaghi, Matt Vanderpool
Class: Design and Manufacturing III
The Soccer Ball Launcher was the design project undertaken by Mike Eller, Matt Carnaghi, and myself for our mechanism design class. This account is a brief summary of our project. If you would like to view our full report click here to download it.
Our original goal was to design something that could randomly shoot a soccer ball to every spot in a soccer goal. We were tasked with creating a design to accomplish this task and turn it into a working prototype.
Patent Search/Market Research:
We started out searching the web for patents and other designs to see what people had already tried. We found no patents registered at The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and only a few designs for machines that would launch a soccerball. No one had designed anything to aim the acutal launching device, or at least not that we could find.
Designing:
To start designing our aiming mechanism we first had to design a path that we wanted our aiming device to follow and then design the mechanism around that path. Our main design goal was to be able to hit all areas of the net and to do so in as random a fashion as possible. We first decided that randomness could be achieved through the firing time and by offsetting the way in which the aiming mechanism followed it's designed path. Determing the path the mechanism should travel turned into a far more difficult problem.
We wanted to design our soccer shooter so that it could hit a net any from 10 - 15 meters away, and at a range of velocities. This leads to a more complex controls problem that was out of the scope of our design class so we simplified our problem down to one distance and one speed. After simplifying we decided we could cover all areas of the net if we used a sinusoid for our base design path and then offset the horizontal and vertical motions so that over a number of cycles it would cover the entire net. The offset would also add to the randomness of the shot direction.
The Mechanism:
Four Bar Mechanism Controlling Horizontal Motion and Driving the Gear Train
To create our desired motion we used a cam system coupled to a fourbar mechanism through a geartrain. The cam would control the vertical part of the mechanism motion and be driven by the fourbar which would control the horizontal aspect of the motion. The hardest part of this project came when we had to manufacture the geartrain connecting the two. With such gear teeth the tolerances were tiny, making for quite a few unsuccesful attempts at assembly.
Gear Train, Cad Rendering and 2-D Layout
Evaluation:
After finishing the project we determined that while we were able to achieve our desired motion we weren't entirely pleased with the over all design. We would have liked a smoother motion and a different design for the firing device then the one we had developed. We were pleased, however, that we were able to achieve our desired motion and couple both the horizontal and vertical mechanical systems with the gear train so that we could run them off of one actuator. Again for our full report and evaluation of the project please Click Here to download our formal report.
The Soccer Ball Launcher was the design project undertaken by Mike Eller, Matt Carnaghi, and myself for our mechanism design class. This account is a brief summary of our project. If you would like to view our full report click here to download it.
Our original goal was to design something that could randomly shoot a soccer ball to every spot in a soccer goal. We were tasked with creating a design to accomplish this task and turn it into a working prototype.
Patent Search/Market Research:We started out searching the web for patents and other designs to see what people had already tried. We found no patents registered at The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and only a few designs for machines that would launch a soccerball. No one had designed anything to aim the acutal launching device, or at least not that we could find.
Designing:
To start designing our aiming mechanism we first had to design a path that we wanted our aiming device to follow and then design the mechanism around that path. Our main design goal was to be able to hit all areas of the net and to do so in as random a fashion as possible. We first decided that randomness could be achieved through the firing time and by offsetting the way in which the aiming mechanism followed it's designed path. Determing the path the mechanism should travel turned into a far more difficult problem.
We wanted to design our soccer shooter so that it could hit a net any from 10 - 15 meters away, and at a range of velocities. This leads to a more complex controls problem that was out of the scope of our design class so we simplified our problem down to one distance and one speed. After simplifying we decided we could cover all areas of the net if we used a sinusoid for our base design path and then offset the horizontal and vertical motions so that over a number of cycles it would cover the entire net. The offset would also add to the randomness of the shot direction.
The Mechanism:
Four Bar Mechanism Controlling Horizontal Motion and Driving the Gear Train
To create our desired motion we used a cam system coupled to a fourbar mechanism through a geartrain. The cam would control the vertical part of the mechanism motion and be driven by the fourbar which would control the horizontal aspect of the motion. The hardest part of this project came when we had to manufacture the geartrain connecting the two. With such gear teeth the tolerances were tiny, making for quite a few unsuccesful attempts at assembly.
Gear Train, Cad Rendering and 2-D Layout
Evaluation:
After finishing the project we determined that while we were able to achieve our desired motion we weren't entirely pleased with the over all design. We would have liked a smoother motion and a different design for the firing device then the one we had developed. We were pleased, however, that we were able to achieve our desired motion and couple both the horizontal and vertical mechanical systems with the gear train so that we could run them off of one actuator. Again for our full report and evaluation of the project please Click Here to download our formal report.