This week, I spent some time fine tuning the iRobot moving mechanisms so that once we get the outputs from the computer vision, we will have more fine grain control of the robot’s motion. At this point, I believe most of the motion planning code for the robot has been written and tested.
Additionally, this week, I deviated a little from my usual tasks and took some time to help Ryan build the frame for the robot. We dimensioned the pieces to make the ramp and hold the motors in place. Then, using the saws in the woodshop in the Maker space, we cut the majority of the pieces. Now, we have all the pieces to build the robot frame and it just needs to be assembled next week.
Finally, my team and I spent a lot of time writing the design report detailing the specifics of the BallBot.
Next week, I will be working more closely with Ishaan in order to integrate the Computer vision with the robot. This might be a little challenging considering the computer vision was done in c++ and the iRobot’s motion were coded using python. I am looking into pybind and other features that can integrate c++ and python code in the meantime. This will also be the first time that we are combining 2 major components of this project and we expect that we will run into a lot of difficulties. However, if we can get this to work, it will be a major milestone in our process of building Ballbot.