
PID Controlled Disc Color Organizer
Graduate Student Instructor
During my graduate degree, I was a Graduate Student Instructor for the Junior level Design and Manufacturing course at the University of Michigan. I lead a lab section with 25 students teaching SolidWorks, MSC Adams, circuit design, and Arduino. It is my job to oversee 5 teams' progress in designing from scratch a PID controlled 4-bar linkage to pick up colored discs and sort them into target zones. Teams competed to sort all the discs in the shortest amount of time.
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Teams design their linkage in Solidworks, justify the motion profile and kinematics in ADAMS (dynamic simulation software), select a transmission by gear inertia matching, develop an assembly plan, wire the electronics, write Arduino code, and tune a PID controller. The video below shows the mechanism I built as I was teaching the course.

