Andrew's Summer Blog

Week 1

This week I completed my safety trainings, got tours of our lab spaces, discussed possible project ideas, and did some data collection!

On Friday, we went to Angel Island as a lab. We had lunch, hiked, and some of us went for a bike ride. It was a great time!!

Week 2

This week I worked on characterizing the electrical components related to GIRAF. This included the base and wrist actuators along with some power distribution and communication protocol stuff.

Later in the week, we had a great intro to robotics session with Venny. I learned the basics of some robotics concepts including links, joints, degrees of freedom, and some early endpoint detection math. After, I got to connect my computer to a rotating joystick sort of robot using the DYNAMIXEL wizard. Derick and I got to contribute to some of the compliance data for the extendable boom.

For the 4th of July weekend, I went on a bike ride for most of the day and then went to a firework show in Mountain View!

Week 3

Early this week I began to consider solutions for streamlining the power distribution for the GIRAF arm electronics. The current setup, pictured below, is pretty unorganized. We're trying to minimize it to one LiPo so we'll have to bring in various buck converters. I began to design a box for this power hub using OnShape.

We had Dr. Akiko Otsuka from JAXA speak to us today. She gave a very interesting presentation and even left us with some gifts!