Grace's Summer Blog
Week 4 (July 15-19)
Monday: Today I worked on writing Arduino code to read the pressure sensor. By looking at the documentation of the pressure sensor, I was able to correctly align it in the circuit have read pressure values be printed in the Serial Monitor. I also set up serial communication between the Arduino MEGA and my computer to use later on for turning on and off the suction. I also gained a better understanding of how the final Arduino Script should be organized.
Week 3 (July 8-12)
Monday: Today I stepped through a Serial Communications tutorial and created serial communication between the Arduino and my laptop's Terminal. Then I created a serial communication between Python and Arduino following a tutorial. I downloaded Miniconda onto my laptop and used Spyder to run a simple Python script that got the Python to send data over the serial port.
I was also assigned the project of designing a suction cup attachment to a robotic arm that will allow contact and pressure sensing of vacuum sealing. Dr. Cutkosky sketched out what this design should roughly look like:
I began by finding the SolidWorks file of the suction cup we had in the lab and importing it onto OnShape.
Tuesday: Today I made a prototype of the suction cup arm attachment. After sketching out the dimensions, I made the prototype out of foam core and hot glue.
Then I began looking through the available tubing to figure out how the vacuum seal would be constructed. I also had a zoom meeting with Dane and found the Arduino files and set up that were being used for this project.
Wednesday: I emailed myself the Suction Cup Arduino code that was found on the BDML computer and commented on each line of the code indicating what that line of code was doing. I also began making a diagram of the tubing layout for the suction cup. The rest of the day I was gone for a SURF Industry Visit.
Thursday: I finished the tubing layout diagram for the suction cup connections. I also created a circuit diagram on TinkerCad that shows the wiring layout for the suction sensing connections. Additionally, I found documentation of the pressure transducer used in this circuit as well as other components such as the relay and the suction cup.
I have been documenting all of this related work in a Suction Sensing Google Doc. Dr. Cutkosky also spent some time explaining the circuit to me and helped with connected a 9V supply to the Arduino MEGA. I then soldered two wires onto the back of the Arduino MEGA for connecting the Solenoid valve to the power supply.
Week 2 (July 1-5)
Monday: This week I was out of town for my sister’s wedding. During the free moments that I had at home, I spent some time creating an OnShape account and watching OnShape tutorials to familiarize myself with the platform.
Tuesday: I made an account on Tinkercad and stepped through some of the Arduino tutorials. After some tutorials on how to use Tinkercad, I simulated a two-pronged Force Sensor connected to an Arduino to mimic the Pressure Sensors that are used in the Suction Cup Adaptive Gripping project. In creating this simulation on Tinkercad, I wrote an Arduino sketch that read and printed in the Serial monitor the reading on the force sensor. If the force was above a certain value, the red LED that was connected to the Arduino was turned on and if not, the LED was left off.
Wednesday: Given my interest in working on the Gecko Adhesion project, I reached out to EmJ for some papers to read about this project and I read and took notes on each of the articles. From the Gravity-assisted flat surface gripper for drone perching article, I learned that some of the key characteristics for the gripper are:
- It should require very little normal force to engage with the surface.
- It should use the adhesive efficiently to maximize load capability, loading the entire adhesive area evenly and avoiding stress concentrations.
- It should support loads in any direction in the half-space above the surface.
- It should release with very little normal force.
From the Astrobee Gripper article, I learned that free-flying robots can help astronauts by reducing the time needed for simple tasks. The gripper of these robots consists of two main subsystems: the lower assembly and the upper assembly. From the Zero-gravity gripper article, I learned that removing orbital debris to prevent collisions with satellites is a challenge that future work aims to address by developing advanced grippers on robotic arms.
Week 1 (June 24-28)
This first week has been a great introduction to the BDML lab. At the beginning of the week I helped clean out the lab which helped me learn more about where things are located in the lab. Later in the week I learned about the TadBot project during a visit to the Biology lab where the frogs are kept. While there, I learned that both frog parents care for the tadpoles and that one of the goals of TadBot is to create realistic tadpole simulators that trick the parents into feeding them by moving at a specific frequency.
This week I also reviewed Python tutorials and learned the basics of reading and writing text files. I learned that MuJoCo is a platform for simulating and testing robotic systems and worked on downloading it onto one of the laptops in the lab. During this process, I learned about Linux virtual environments, which allow different versions of the same tool, and created one on the laptop to use MuJoCo with.