As fun as it would be to build a new claw, somebody suggested that I should just try the old claw to pick up pop cans.  After a trial test with an empty can, this appears to be promising.  To do further testing, I am going to modify the claw machine code to be more "open" in testing environments, but still able to revert it back to claw machine mode.  Check out the claw machine logs for further details.