Posted on

Matt’s Status Report for 4/12

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I finetuned the vision module’s height and speed calculations to more accurately handle edge cases (box on the edge of the treadmill, tall box, etc.). I also finetuned the angles of the main file’s inverse kinematics outputs to align with the arm’s idiosyncracies (arm plane is slightly tilted). I was able to sync the main program’s axes/commands almost perfectly with the arm’s angle quirks to maximize accuracy. I also tweaked the timing/buffering of how the main file sends commands to the arm to ensure smoothness and reliability during pickup. In particular, it was previously having problems with moving the box up and to the bin after grabbing it. We were able to test the system on example boxes running on the treadmill and achieve 80% pickup success (8/10 runs).

Is your progress on schedule?

We are running on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I plan to finish the final presentation by next week, as I will be presenting on Monday. I also hope to make some physical bins and test the arm’s ability to drop the boxes in them, as we’ve currently only tested the arm dropping the box at the bin position.

Posted on

Team status report 4/12

These past two weeks have been working on getting the robot to pick up a box every time. We integrated the qr algo with the robot kinematic algorithm and were able to reliably pick up multiple boxes in a row.

We are going to continue to work to make the process more reliable and integrate with bins for sorting.

Posted on

Marcus Status Report 4/12

The last two weeks Ive been testing and rebuilding the robot arm to make it more reliable. I have updated system to have both arm and electronic controllers on the same 3d printed structure, and revised pieces to make wires internal. I tested some pwm ramping functions, and am still revising control software.

I had difficulty threading the wires through the structural components, and adjusting calibration for each new iteration.

Next week we are going to work on dialing in arm movement.

Posted on

Raunak’s Status Report for 4/12

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? 

This week, I worked on integration testing with the QR code scanner system and the robotic arm. We realized that the robotic arm was sometimes too slow and sometimes too fast at picking up the packages, so we had to make sure that it was reliable. After tweaking the code, I tested the robotic arm’s pick up reliability and 9/10 times it was able to pick up the moving box. In addition to this, I worked extensively on the final report. We received a lot of constructive feedback for our midway reports, so I wanted to start early on the final report to work on the areas that need improvement. I wrote about half of the report so far including the introduction, use-case requirements, design and implementation sections.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? 

Our progress is on schedule!

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, we plan on doing more testing with the entire system. Specifically, we 3D printed a few boxes of different heights and we want to verify that the system picks up all three boxes reliably. I will also continue working on the final report, taking the feedback from the midway report into account.

Testing and Verification Supplement

Our testing mostly includes integration tests with the entire system. This involves running an end-to-end test by placing a box on the treadmill and seeing if the robotic arm is able to pick up the box correctly. We prefer this over software-only tests because they tell us more information about what we need to improve. For example, the arm dropped one of the boxes in one of these tests, and we realized that the end effector had significant jitter, which was causing this. As a result, we ordered a new servo for the end effector to mitigate the jitter that was causing the box to be dropped. Our measured results include the number of times the box is able to be picked up reliably. For example, we test the end-to-end process 10 times and see how many times the robotic arm does its job. Initially, it was only getting it right 1 or 2 times out of 10, but now it gets it right pretty much every time. These are the most important metrics that we look at.

Posted on

Team Status Report 3/29

This week we worked to integrate all of our components. We were able to integrate the camera with the robot arm and ewer able to track qr codes and use that as a trigger to pick up packadges. We connect the camera to the Arduino through the macbook serial. We are going to work on making the movements faster and qr codes more accurate.

Posted on

Marcus status Report 3/29

This week I wrote more code to control the robot arm, and designed a clamp to connect the camera to our treadmill in a robust non moving manner. I isolated the vacuum from the sensors to help with keeping steady voltage feedback. We were able to get the robot to pick up multiple packages in a row. Next steps are adding better move selection and qr tracking.

Posted on

Matt’s Status Report for 3/29

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I tested the entire software system with the robotic arm. This involved running the main function, which relied on the QR scanning and kinematics modules to send commands to the Arduino controlling the arm. I was able to successfully verify the general logic of the main function and send accurate, fast commands to the robotic arm’s Arduino. One of our main concerns was that the delays of scanning the QR code, getting the box speed, sending the commands to the arm, and the arm actually moving would be too slow to efficiently grab the boxes on our relatively short treadmill. We were able to assuage those fears, as the system ran very quickly with time to spare. I greatly extended the main file this week, as it needed to be updated with the new additions I made to the QR scanning file and supplemented with the greater understanding I gained of the Arduino control inputs. I also spent a lot of time this week tweaking and improving the main and QR scanner files, as there were numerous issues with the accuracy and precision of predicting the box’s movements and converting the camera readings into real world coordinates relative to the arm (pixels -> centimeters).

Is your progress on schedule?

We are running on schedule.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to continue testing the software system that runs on PC (vision, kinematics, and command modules) with the arm. The arm currently has some idiosyncrasies with the angles that haven’t been completely tested and mapped out. I plan to do some more robust testing of the vision module’s real-world mapping as well by placing boxes of different heights at specific locations on the treadmill running at specific speeds. Hopefully I’ll be able to verify that the real-world position/speed mappings are accurate now that I’ve revamped that code. I also hope to at least gain a better understanding of the exact arm angles relative to the command inputs, as I haven’t had that much time with the arm. Best case, by the end of the week, I will have the entire box-grabbing system working in a reliable and decently accurate manner.

Posted on

Raunak’s Status Report for 3/29

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I worked on integrating the QR code detection algorithm with the robotic arm. Previously, we had to send commands manually to tell the robotic arm when to pick up a box. But, this week, we got hooked up the QR code system with the arm, so now it picks up the box when the QR code is detected. I worked on debugging some of the code that was causing the arm to be too delayed in picking up the box. This involved changing the delays in the QR code detector code to be less. I also worked with the rest of the team to test our system with real boxes moving on the treadmill. We were able to get the arm to reliably pick up moving boxes based on the QR code detection. Aside from that, I’m also starting to draft aspects of the final report. Based on feedback from our midway report, we need to add more details to our final report and tell a story about how our product is better than existing products. I’m starting to list some bullet points of what we might want to talk about in the final report.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? 

Our progress is definitely on schedule.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Next week, I plan on working on getting the robotic arm to place boxes in different containers based on the QR code. Currently, the robotic arm places all objects in the same location. So, I need to add a bit of logic to tell the arm to place the robotic arm in different locations. Once that’s done, all of our main goals for this project should be covered. I also want to get a good chunk of the final report drafted since we have a good sense of what we need to include at this point.

Posted on

Team Status Report 3/22

This week we put it all together and got our robot to pick up packages off a moving conveyer belt. This was accomplished by wiring up the robot fully, and using the Arduino to run multiple to-position moves. This serves as a big milestone for us as we have achieved a working robot that can complete tasks.

Our next steps are fine tuning our control algos over the coming weeks to pick up lots of packages fast. We need to dial in our time tolerances. We also need to add boxes for the robot to put boxes into.

 

Posted on

Marcus Status Report 3/22

This week I finished up wiring the robot and wrote code to run and send angle feedback position moves. It took alot of trouble shooting to get all three angle sensors accurately measuring 0-180 of the three main actuators but luckily it wasn’t to hard to get the vacuum to turn on and off.  I spent alot of time this week wiring, troubleshooting, and programming the robot arm. Luckily all the work paid off and we had a successful package pick up and move. I was able to get the robot to run to 7 diffrent positions in a row using a command sender app and a Arduino control sketch. I got the robot to pick up a moving package on its 15th try.

Our next steps are combining our QR and robot algos, then we should be able to sort package efficiently