What I did last week

Last week I focused on designing the backend inverse-kinematics system.

What I did this week

The robotic arm came this week and we met to build it.

The arm has 6 servo motors and is controlled by an Arduino through a motor driver shield.  I did some reading on the API that controls the arm and was able to run a test script that moved it around.  The plan is to have paths generated by the RRT module converted into control signals by the inverse kinematics module.  These paths will then be communicated to the Arduino over UART.

Now that we have access to the arm, I can begin to implement and test the inverse-kinematics system and arm control.  We had some discussions on how to set up our test scene and are planning on building a shelf.  This can be used to test our systems ability to reach into confined spaces.  We believe this will be a good initial test of our system in real world scenarios.

I continued work on the perception simulator and the baseline RRT implementation.

What I plan to do next week

Finish the initial baseline RRT implementation.

Finish the initial perception simulator.

Continue work on inverse kinematics and arm control.