Joseph Jang’s Status Report 4/10

This week I continued to work on the inverse kinematics of the robot.  To help debug the issue, I disassembled parts of the robot to make sure each joint is being turned to the proper angle.  I found several electrical and embedded software bugs.  I do not think the issue with the inverse kinematics is caused by MATLAB’s implementation of the IK solver.  However,  I will also be making use of the ROS IK libraries to code in python.  Another issue I found was the stepper motor is heating up rather quickly even when it is not in action.  Because it is turned on even though no commands are being sent to it, it heats up quickly.  Therefore, I made use of the enable pin, so that the base of the robot will be in place but not turn on when it is unnecessary.  That way the stepper motor will not be overloaded and burned out.  On several occasions, the motor had become very hot, so this was a proper risk mitigation fix.