Alex’s Robot Brings Any Storage Tote Straight to You with Just a Tap of the Touchscreen

Digital claw machines let you grab virtual prizes with a few clicks, yet real garages still demand ladders, stretching, and sore backs every time something sits on a high shelf. Alex of Hobby Built decided to change that equation in his basement workshop. He designed and built a three-axis gantry robot that retrieves and returns any one of 24 heavy storage totes with nothing more than a tap on a screen.

The totes are arranged neatly on a rack in four columns of six rows each. A robust frame is built around a timber frame with some Unistrut metal supports underneath. Along one side of this frame is the gantry, which is made up of steel beams and smooth UHMW plastic sliders that simply glide along. The gantry is designed to glide back and forth, lift up and down, and reach forward to grip and pull out a tote. A large counterbalance balances the weight of all the totes stacked up, ensuring that the motors do not get strung out when transporting a hefty bin.

When you stand in front of the touchscreen on the side of this contraption and want to grab a tote, simply press the button with the matching number on it. The Raspberry Pi 4 receives the message and delivers a signal using its GPIO pins. StepperOnline’s large servo motors burst to life, with 5:1 outputs and an electronic brake to boot. They get into position, elevate or lower themselves to the appropriate shelf, and then reach out to grasp the tote. Once it has been lowered to waist height, the user can begin working, and when finished, another tap on the screen returns it to its original position.

It’s all pretty quiet and smooth since Alex chose high-quality industrial-grade components to get the job done quickly. The steel and plastic components are kept light to withstand being jostled around a lot. You won’t need any difficult programming to get this thing operating because it simply instructs the servo motors where to go and when to stop. The interface contains a grid of buttons that correspond to each tote location.

Future updates will make the system even more intuitive. Alex plans to add voice control so a spoken request like “bring me the tote with my gloves” will let the robot locate the right bin and deliver it automatically. For now the touchscreen already removes every bit of physical effort from the storage process.
[Source]