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Our inspiration for this project was the toy desktop basketball catapults that many of us had as kids, similar to Figure 1 below. We wanted to improve upon this idea where we could create a robot that is able to shoot consistently from various angles and locations; as well as automatically reload the shooter. This is an interesting problem to solve because we will have to design the system in a way where we are able to get an accurate trajectory and snap of the ball so that it will be able to make it into the basket. Due to having it shoot from more than one specified location it will consist of multiple iterations and design of linkages to be able to get all the desired shooting points.
Figure 1: Toy Basketball Shooter
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Our preliminary design idea is to use a 4 bar mechanism to launch the ball. We sketched an example shot trajectory that mimics the smooth motion of a jump shot. This preliminary design does not include a flick at the end of the motion to create a realistic finish to the shot, but we hope to include that in our final mechanism.
Figure 2: Shot Path Using 4-bar Linkage