This week we continued testing and improving our end to end system (robot arm + vision/control modules). We improved the servo on the 4th axis to keep it reliably downward, improved the Arduino feedback control algorithm, and centralized the Arduino, vacuum, motor controllers, and horizontal actuator to our 3d-printed platform that we mounted on a steel plate for stability. We also greatly improved the smoothness and time-efficiency of box pickups and drops via changes to the main control code. We also fixed some bugs with the PC-Arduino connection, coded handling for various edge cases, improved the accuracy of the control logic / commands sent, and finetuned the command sequences to match the new arm changes. We achieved an item sort rate of 7 per minute, such that were able to reliably sort a box and reset completely within 10s.
Our current biggest risk is that our end-to-end system is still slower and more inaccurate (7/min and 80%) than the goals we set (8/min & 90%). We are working on testing our system to increase speed/reliability. We plan to run our unit tests again and really finetune those accuracies, as well as continuing end-to-end testing and focusing very tightly on the command sequencing / PC-Arduino interfacing.
