An example of tabs in a 2D geometric unfolding
This quarter, my main goals are finishing up my research with RoCo (Robot Compiler), and planning and starting a new research project in a new area.
After working on RoCo for the past year, the project has grown considerably, and new team members will begin working on the project as my involvement comes to an end. In order to ensure this transition goes smoothly, my last main goals for RoCo involve adding some desired functionality to get RoCo to a stable state, and adding documentation that will help new team members or users work with the system.
The two desired pieces of functionality I hope to add are automatic tabbing for printed robots, and cutout functionality in our graphical interface. This week I worked on the automatic tabbing problem. When a robot geometry is converted from 3D to 2D form for printing, it is likely that the body of the robot must be split in certain places. Adding tabs gives an easy way to connect these splits once the robot is printed, but currently they must be added to the 2D drawing manually. This week I have been coming up with a way to analyze the geometry and add these tabs automatically, and I hope to have this implemented by next week.
After I finish working on RoCo, I hope to begin investigating a new research topic this quarter. Me and my group are interested in learning about machine learning methods and their application to robot design and control. Throughout the week I have been conducting a literature review to see what has been done in the field, and what areas we could possibly contribute in.