January 2019 - May 2019, for MRover and Computer Engineering Senior Design -- EECS 467: Autonomous Robotics (Dr. Chad Jenkins). Semi-automating a 6 degree-of-freedom arm for use on a mobile robotic platform in the desert.
In order to achieve the complex manipulation tasks at competition, arbitrary positioning of the end-effector is necessary. Thus, we built a 6 degree-of-freedom (6 DOF) arm. However, to effectively use a highly configurable arm, kinematics and motion planning are necessary as manually operating 6 actuators is difficult time consuming. I used my Computer Engineering Senior Design class (EECS 467 -- Autonomous Robotics with Chad Jenkins) to implement these capabilities for our arm.
The design was executed with these goals in mind:
The project was overall a success, but needs a lot of improvement to make the most use out of the arm hardware. The project is currently being continued for use in URC 2020.
Successes:
Failures:
Future work: