Week 2
Friday 03/18
Lab meeting in the morning. Third brainstorming session with Tony. Finalized a design strategy for a possible 2D gripper subject to a pulling force oriented in a generic direction. Coarse determination of the spine compliances required by the application. Integrated the stochastic distribution of the asperities on a surface to estimate the lifting capabilities of the gripper and the load sharing on the spines.
Thursday 03/17
Second brainstorming session with Tony. Understood the spine-surface interaction and started modelling a possible gripper. Discussed about the preload to apply to spines and important design parameters in the rock grasping process.
Wednesday 03/16
Continued going through MuJoCo documentation. Started a google doc to summarize useful information about the software.
Tuesday 03/15
First brainstorming session with Tony and Brian to better understand the properties of he interaction between spines and a rough surface. Discussion about the Hao Jiang's Ph.D. thesis and William Roderick's bio inspired perching paper.
Monday 03/14
After discussion in the weekly meeting we decided that the simulation should not be overly detailed. Simulating the single microspine could lead to computation problems due to numerical singularities. Read a paper from Hauser et al. about the modelling of a spine unit as a contact patch with anisotropic friction properties. Spent some time reading through the MuJoCo documentation how to specify the friction properties of a contact pair in simulation.
Week 1
Friday 03/11
Participated to Lab Meeting in the morning. Tried to understand better the XML script logic to set up a MuJoCo simulation. Tried to import a STL file from generated through SolidWorks to give a first trial to the simulation of a microspine.
Thursday 03/10
Set up mujoco-py on laptop and did some tests to check functionality. Read a couple of papers on ReachBot and previous works on microspine grasping and gripper mechanisms.