Helena Project Update 13

Week 6

Project Update 13

Progress

This week involved finishing the presentation for STR, a all-team social event, presenting STR, and meeting with Dr. Smart. The meeting with Dr. Smart was on Monday and provided a lot of useful information for pathfinding and automation. We discussed methods for creating the Configuration Space. Dr. Smart explained the ways in which we should limit the payload to keep the configuration space as a plane in R4. We also discussed the best way to generate the configuration space. The options that we discussed were calculating it mathematically using Inverse Kinematics, running a simulation in solid works, or physically moving the arm to valid configurations and mapping those. Each of these methods has benefits and drawbacks. STR occured on friday. In preparation we created the slides throughout the week. On thursday, at our all-team meeting, we went through all the slides in preparation for the presentation on Friday at 6am. The presentation went very well on Friday. The project reviewer said that she was excited to see our project and that our presentation and progress were both very good. The all-team social was at the All-Team meeting on Thursday after we finished all relevant business. We ordered pizza and played board games. The Software team was divided between the two teams with Michael and I against Amber. Amber's team won the first two rounds, but Michael and I brought in a win in the last round. All in all, it was an effective evening of work and team bonding.

Plans

The next week will focus on creating and recording our presentation for the Senior Design class. We will be working on the presentation on Tuesday, finishing it on Wednesday in order to record the video on Wednesday or Thursday. We will finish the project with editing and posting the video on Thursday and Friday to have it done by Friday. I will also be updating the design documents from last term to reflect the changes we have made. I do not expect there to be significant changes, however there may be some slight modifications to the pathfinding and automation section to reflect what Dr. Smart taught us this week.

Problems

The motors have arrived, so I am no longer blocked on progressing in the code. Following the completion of the presentation for CS462, I will be able to dive into the pathfinding code.