What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
This week, we made huge progress on combining all of the working parts together. Namely, the robotic arm is now able to pick up objects off of the conveyor belt, which is the MVP for our project (see slack for video). My contribution to this mainly involved writing Arduino code that controls the arm. I wrote a significant portion of the code that controls the third motor (horizontal axis) which allows the robotic arm to move side-to-side (so that it can drop off the box after picking it up). This was the final piece of the code that enabled our arm to pick up and drop off boxes in their bins. I also continued working on some of the extra features I wanted to add from last week (the ML object detection code) in parallel.
Is your progress on schedule or behind?
Our progress is on schedule!
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
While our robotic arm picks up and drops of boxes correctly, it is quite slow. It takes about 15-20 seconds for the entire process of picking up and dropping the box. We want to increase the speed of this overall process and bring it down to ~5 seconds for the entire process. This will involve increasing the RPMs of the motor and writing code to handle this. We will also have to test that the arm doesn’t make more mistakes because of the increased speed. Additionally, we want to begin hooking up the camera system to the robotic arm so that we can pick up objects with the QR code detection.