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Matt’s Status Report for 4/19

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

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.

Is your progress on schedule?

We are running on schedule but need to do more finetuning next week to ensure our project is as demo-ready as possible.

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

Accomplishing 90% box pickup+sort+drop accuracy/reliability and 8 box/min speed. Currently around 80% accuracy and 7 box/min.

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Marcus Status Report 4/19

This week I worked on the Arduino feedback control algorithm, and tested robot arm with the Qr detection system. I changed the servo on the 4th axis to have higher volts and refresh at a lower rate, that helped with the jitter and keeping it reliably downward. I also centralized the Arduino, vacuum, motor controllers and horizontal actuator to 3d platform that we connected to a steel plate under the treadmill.

We are working to make our synchronous box pickup more reliable and quick.

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Team Status Report for 4/19

This week we worked on our height algorithm and testing the overall system. We achieved an item sort rate of 7 per minute, such that were able to reliably sort a box and reset completely within 10s.

We are working on testing our system and increasing speed/ reliability.

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Raunak’s Status Report for 4/19

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I helped with the end-to-end testing to make sure that we are ready for the demo. With the rest of the team, I helped verify that the arm was able to pick up boxes off the treadmill at 0.5mph and place them in the correct bin. I helped time the runs, and we found that the arm was able to sort the bins at 10 boxes per minute, so we were very happy with that. Other than that, I continued making progress on the final report by adding the system implementation, ethics, and summary sections. I also finalized the bill of materials and am working on the final Gantt chart for our report.

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 will focus on the presentation. We are planning to demo the robotic arm, so we need to make sure that it goes smoothly. Once that’s done, we will work on the final poster, video, and report for the following week. We are pretty much done in terms of implementation and are mostly looking to wrap things up well.

Supplement

Personally, I used a lot of online resources to learn what I needed for this project. I had no prior experience with robotic arms before this, and I found online articles and videos very helpful. My main responsibility for this project was the kinematics engine, so I used a lot of online articles to learn the math behind everything. I also used online forums for Arduino help since it’s been a long time since I wrote that kind of code. I’m not much of a textbook person, so I find online resources very helpful because they are more focused and to the point. In terms of learning strategies, I made sure to never rely on a single website/article for anything. Whenever I found some important piece of knowledge, I verified it with another source. This was to gauge how many people approach similar problems as opposed to looking at the problem from a single perspective. This gave me the freedom to use different aspects from different sources.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.