Personal tasks of this week:
Task: Simplification of the analog circuit
Definition: Simplify the analog circuit so it can be realized by less components, especially expensive components. This is necessary mainly because there’s a significant risk of the project going over-budget. In addition, a circuit with more component would require more calibration, and is more likely to demonstrate unexpected behavior.
Completion: The task is completed. We discovered and leveraged the fact that a variable and its mirror variable will never be connected to the same equality constraint circuit in any valid problem, based on the formulation of LPs. Therefore, we were able to multiplex digital potentiometers with analog switches, reducing the number of digital potentiometers by half. The updated BoM shows the reduce component cost:
Task: Implementation of the SLP solver for NMPC
Definition: Implement a software SLP solver that solves the NLP associated with the NMPC controller of the torque-limited single pendulum swing-up problem.
Completion: The task is partially completed. We’ve made substantial progress towards a functional software NLP solver using the SLP algorithm and the Casadi library.
Next Steps:
My next step is to fix issues in the analog circuit with Andrew, and finish implementing SLP with Alvin.
Overall progress assessment:
My progress is on-schedule, as all of my tasks this week have been completed.