Helena Project Update 14

Week 7

Project Update 14

Progress

This week was focused on preparing the Midterm project update for the Senior Design course. I started the slides on Monday using our STR presentation as a base and added more details on the software side of the project and deleted many of the slides from STR that were focused on the hardware side. On Thursday we met as a group to finalize the slides and record the audio. Michael then edited the audio while I worked on updating our written documents for last term, compiling my blog posts, and starting the retrospective. Also on Thursday was the all-team meeting. We discussed funding issues because AIAA will not be contributing as much money to the project as they initially said they would, so we now have about $30,000 to fund raise. We will all be reaching out to previous employers, etc. to raise the remainder of the funds.

Plans

The next week will focus on building the configuration space. We are still trying to get motors to use for this step since they need to be back-driven and have encoders. We will be buying foam to line the payload. We will then line the payload with foam to provide a buffer of forbidden space in the C-Space before any collision occurs between the arm and payload. Next we will attach the motors to the arm and an arduino. We will use the arduino to read values from the motors as we back-drive them through every valid configuration. Finally, we will use this data to build the c-space. This will take up most of the week. The only other plan is that the Tuesday Senior Design class is required attendance.

Problems

We have not yet found motors to use for building the C-Space.