Week 2

Week 2

Day 1

I began the week by continuing my work programming the lynx motion arm in player/stage. I found the driver that is needed by the arm to allow it to move. I began having trouble compiling this driver.

Day 2

I continued looking into the file directory for this driver, and found that is was by default disabled, and I downloaded the required libraries that it requires for the inverse kinematics. After this was complete I found more errors with the eeDHcontroller, where it could not find the files that I just downloaded.

Day 3
Continued with trying to debug the program by digging more into the file directory. We had our weekly seminar which was about selecting graduate schools, and statement of purpose when applying.

Day 4

We had a little breakthrough with one of my colleagues who got a new error instead of the error I was receiving. We spent the rest of the day trying to figure out this problem

Day 5

We spent this day continuing our research into this problem. I found a paper with a sample program that was written by some professors at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Goals Completed for project:

Evaluation of all 3 robotic software programs

Goals I'm working on:

Getting lynx motion arm to work with player/stage

Week 1

Week 1

I arrived in Tuscaloosa, AL on May 29, 2010, and moved onto the campus of the University of Alabama on May 30, 2010.

Day 1

The first day of my REU consisted of an Orientation with the other REU's that are being hosted on the University. During this orientation we met the other students and were introduced to the Dean of Graduate studies here.

After orientation we got to visit the labs we would be working in and get keys to our offices where we would do most of our research. During this tour I met Dr. Monica Anderson with whom I will be working with. After meeting with Dr. Anderson she held a meeting where we would meet with the graduate students, and the other undergraduates I would be working with, and I received the project I would be working on.

My Project:

Myself and 3 other students are working with 3 main different types of software(Player/Stage, Pre-op(www.cs.ua.edu/preop ), and ROS(robotic operating system – www.ros.org )). We will look into the different pieces of software and some others to see which software has the easiest user usability.

Day 2

The second day myself and the other REU students went through a Health&Safety seminar. After that seminar I began with my research which began with looking at an existing program that the students at the University of Alabama had created which used an i robot create with a robotic arm to play chess and explain it to my colleagues. After that was done I had to install player/stage onto my computer and find a way to control the robotic arm with player/stage rather than the software they were already using.

Day 3

The third began with me continuing with installing player/stage onto the computer.

Day 4

The fourth day I made progress with getting the player part of player stage onto the computer and beginning to look at the drivers for controlling a robotic arm which are: actarray, limb, and gripper. As I found these drivers I began to look into which drivers controlled what, and I came up with the idea to use the stage part of player/stage which is a simulator to write the program and simulate it in stage.\

Day 5

I downloaded stage and began to build and compile it to install it. This part of my research will expand into week 2 of my research.

Goals to be completed during weeks 1 – 2:

Write program for arm in player/stage
Write program for arm in Pre-op