What I did last week

Wrote dense matrix A*

What I did this week

This week I worked on inverse kinematics and arm control.  I was previously unfamiliar with the intricacies of inverse kinematics so the majority of my time this week was spent on getting up to speed.  I found a course at MIT on Robotic Manipulation and watched a significant number of the lectures.  The course notes are also available which helped me do some initial calculations on how convert the path we generated into servo motor angles.  These calculations involve initializing the arm into a known state and then creating rotation matrices that correspond to the steps in the path.

I also wrote a python script which allows us to communicate with the Arduino that controls the robotic arm.  This script in conjunction with some code I wrote for the Arduino should allow us to send the servo motor angles we generate during inverse kinematics from my laptop to the arm.

I plan on testing these this script and the calculations I have done in class on Monday.  I anticipate there being a good amount of calibration and troubleshooting.

As we begin to work on porting our code to the FPGA, I have started to look at writing a SMA* implementation.  This is a memory bounded version of A* that would be necessary on the FPGA due to its inability to dynamically allocate memory.

What I plan to do next week

Test and calibrate inverse kinematics and arm control.

Implement SMA*