Week 4

Day 1

I began the week with a breakthrough, one of my colleagues in the lab got the arm moving with ROS by simply using the serial port and basically telling it different positions by changing it and saving it every time, and running it. So we went through different tests trying to create a program using that method.

Day 2

This day we began to work with the calliope robot that Dave Touretzkey created. We really just work with the servos, just to learn them and what they do. We also returned the lynx motion arm that the undergraduate team would be using for their chess bot for the AAAI conference competition.

Day 3

I spent the first part of my day looking at the different documentation on the calliope. We also had our weekly seminar which was on computer science research presentations. After the seminar we began to build calliope. This was a pretty easy build due to the fact we only had the first part of calliope which is the platform and the pan and tilt camera.

Day 4

The CS REU took a trip to Atlanta, GA to Google and we visited their facilities, and talked to their employees. After our visit there we took a trip to 6 flags and spent the rest of the day there .

Day 5

I spent that day working with the camera on the calliope I got the blob finder and camera to work. After that success I spent the rest of the day researching whether I could get the servos to work with the player/stage, which had no success.

Goals completed:

Evaluation of the 3 robotic software programs.

Goals I'm working on:

Working with Tekkotsu to get the servos to move

Begin: May 30, 2010
End: July 31, 2010