1.) Accomplishments for this week: This week I was responsible for presenting the project proposal, so I focused a lot on that. I spent a significant amount of time researching various aspects of the project including the software we plan on using for the forward and inverse kinematic equations for the arm movement as well as the computer vision models for QR code detection. For instance, I found this very useful blog post on the implementation of kinematics in C++ (https://medium.com/geekculture/inverse-kinematics-solver-in-c-e999f1b7f353), which is what we plan on working with for the project. I then practiced presenting this information concisely for the proposal presentation. After the presentation, I thought about and documented some of the feedback we received. One critical feedback that I documented was that we need to think about whether we want our boxes to have variable or fixed height, which we will have to take into consideration for the kinematic equations. I discussed this with the team and we believe that our scope will be for fixed length boxes as our focus is going to be on getting the robotic arm to work correctly.
2.) Is my progress up to date?: Yes, I believe that we are up to date on the project so far. We spent a lot of time doing research on this project and we are now ready to move towards the implementation phase, which will begin next week.
3.) Deliverables for next week: Next week we want to begin programming the kinematic equation solver. We believe that this will be the most challenging aspect of the software, so we want to begin as early as we can. Ideally, for next week, we hope to have the forward kinematic solver completed and unit tested. I plan on working with Matt on this implementation and testing the forward solver as well. This won’t be a final test for the functionality as unit-testing can only do so much, but I think this will be a solid first step toward the software aspect of this project. If we get extra time outside of this, we might also start looking into QR code data sets that we can use in our CV model.