This week, I made a lot of improvements to the main file and how it uses the QR data and kinematics to send commands to the arm. In particular, testing and improving the smoothness and time-efficiency of box pickups and box drops. I also implemented safeguards and handling for scenarios in which the box is out of reach (the arm can’t quite reach the entirety of the treadmill width). Additionally, I tweaked the bin dropoff locations to be much more accurate and fixed some bugs with the Arduino connection. Since we made some major changes to the arm last week, I also spent a lot of time finetuning the command sequences again. Finally, I experimented with changing how the arm picks up boxes and moving the arm in line with the treadmill during pickup instead of moving straight up and down to reduce wear on the gripper.
