24_8 3D-komponentner

To make the robot deal cards aswell as collect them there were a few parts that were needed:

• Player card holder
• Dealer (Robot) Carddeck holder
• Gripper
• Cardflipping mechanism
• Dealer card holder flop to river

Player card holder

The goal of making a player card holder is to have a fixed position to deliver and gather the player cards. This will speed robot dealing and collecting since it won't need to use vision for this all the time.

The design of this holder is very simple, however we make sure that it is easy for the player to collect and look at their cards.

Robot cardstack holder

We need a spot for the robot to keep the stack of cards. Here we need to make sure that the robot can pick and place cards from the stack with ease, also for expandability reasons we need the robot to be able to pick the entire stack of cards using its gripper. This part went through seven different iterations before we settled on the current design. We tested the possibility of having the stack be spring loaded so the robot would always pick and place at the same height, but we found that this was difficult to achieve properly. The switch to a larger suction cup allowed us to omit this since the robot had a lot of play in the distance it could pick up a card from.

Gripper

The gripper of the robot has been the most difficult design challenge. Research into how this problem has been solved before lead to many different results, also the requirement that the robot needed to be able to pick the entire card stack or a single card made this design more difficult. Designs that could achieve this using compliant grippers exist however none are publicly available for download, so this was not a viable design. We scavanged the gripper possibilites we had in the lab and decided on using a completed as the base called hand-e from RobotIQ. This allowed us to design a gripper that could grip the entire stack of cards easily, and using the additional screw holes on the gripper base allowed us to attach a suction cup to it for single card picking. This design could use more refining but for our purposes it works.

Cardflipper

Flipping cards that were not the right way was a challenge. If we did not do this we would start dealing cards face up. Therefore we needed a way of flipping the cards with the robot. The original idea for this was some sort of "ski-jump" were the robot would place the card at the top of the "jump" and it would slide down and flip itself. From some basic cardboard testing we concluded that this was not the best way forward with this. Instead we settled on a simple 45 degree plate that we could place a card on. This allowed the robot to orient itself in such a way that when it let go of the card it could pick it back up but flipped.

Dealt cards holder

As most people know in texas hold-em poker the dealer lays out five cards during the duration of a round. We need the robot to have set spots for dealing these cards. The hope is that the players don't mess with these cards but we will still make sure that the cards are in the same location every round. Placing this close to the card stack holder allows for the robot to deal cards faster aswell.

Final product implemented

Once the designs had been refined and tested we ended up with our final product.