Advanced Manufacturing Lab M1 Abrams Tank

I was on a team of 11 students tasked with building 300 scale models of an M1 Abrams Tank. We split up responsibilities and handled everything from designing packaging, designing and machining plastic injection molds, and automated assembly.

I worked on the automated assembly of the tank once the parts were already made. I also worked a few 3 hours shifts on the injection molding machine to get as many of our parts made as we could throughout the semester.

We had a 6 axis Staubli robot and a 4 axis Adept Cobra robot. I was just a part of a larger team here but I did quite a bit of fixture design, machining, and robot programming to help the automated assembly be a reality. In the end, we assembled a few using the robots, but it was faster to just build them by hand in the last few days of the semester…oops.

Fresh out of the injection mold

Fixture to dispense axles into the hull. I designed and built this little XY table that used an actuator and then the staubli robot.

The robots for assembly along with conveyor to move the completed parts from one subassembly area to the other subassembly area.

Finished product without the packaging