Kovari Mechanical Design and Manufacturing

CAD design, CNC machining, fabrication, and tolerancing

Design and 3D print mechanical hardware for Kovari's teleoperated robots, covering cable management, camera mounting, and sensor harness integration across three separate components, and manufacture robot arm components on a CNC mill.

Each component had to work around fixed constraints it couldn't change. The wire holders needed to secure XT30 leads without restricting arm movement or blocking shroud clearance. The camera mount had to align an inherently off-center ZED Mini to the robot's centerline while clearing an existing head-mounted camera. The Raspberry Pi mount had to integrate onto a teleoperation harness's existing hardpoints alongside a Vive tracker without interfering with the operator.

All three parts were modeled in Onshape and printed in PLA. Two XT30 wire holders replaced a silicone-based hold method with a rigid mount that routes cable slack away from the arm's range of motion while leaving room for the shroud. The ZED Mini mount was offset so its asymmetric cameras sit on the robot's centerline, with imported geometry corrected for an off-center error. The Raspberry Pi mount was built around the harness's existing hardpoints to hold both the Pi and a Vive tracker. On the manufacturing side, I machined parts on a Tormach 1100 MX 3-axis CNC mill, producing seven robot arm components across different setups. I programmed the toolpaths in Fusion 360 CAM and leveraged adaptive toolpaths, including 2D and 3D adaptive, to cut machining time.