Sorry if this is poorly worded, I'm extremely new to SolidWorks. (College Freshman taking Intro to Solidworks)
When you make an assembly (in this case the mechanical claw exercise in the Student Workbook), is there any way to make the assembly stop when it encounters a solid object (I.e. the claw reaches the bottom of the center post) so that it no longer passes through the center post as if it was not there at all?
Collision Detection does work, but in real life, you don't use it very often. It takes lots of calculations and slow movement for the system to determine where everything is. As a general rule you only run that when you are investigating something special. For normal daily use, look into limit mates to limit how far something moves. Much less intensive.
WT
The information you are looking for will be found in the subject - distance mates. It is one of the advanced mates.
When moving the component in the assembly, use the MOVE COMPONENT command on the Assembly toolbar, One of the options that comes up in the feature manager tree is COLLISION DETECTION. Then you can choose Stop at Collision and that part or parts will stop when it collides. However if you continue with the move component, it will continue thru the part