Doc Oc

Inspiration

While touring the Freeman factory and looking for tasks that took a lot of man hours to complete, we found that sanding wall panels was a large use of time. Each booth they assemble requires thousands of vertical square ft of plywood to be manually sanded. Not only is this a big time-spender, but it's exhausting work. The belt sanders weigh about 15 pounds, have to be continuously lifted, and held out in front of the body.

With that in mind, we sought out to reduce the strain of sanding.

What it does

We built a single-armed exoskeleton that holds the operating tool in front of you, relieving the strain of holding the heavy piece. A small vest transfers the weight of the tool to the torso with a high-torque stepper motor.

How I built it

We built this exoskeleton out of CNC cut acrylic, aluminum, hand-sown straps for the vest, a large stepper motor, a 3D printed coolant system, plywood, an ATmega328 microprocessor, and embedded C code.

Challenges I ran into

We're running out of time!

Built With

• 3d-print
• arduino
• cnc
• embedded-c
• relay