09 May

This week, we came up with some implementation idea that will fundamentally change Roco. 1 An inspiration that hit me while I was implementing face-edge connection As I implement face-edge connection, I came to realize that to build a connection(let's say addConnection(B,A)), we really only...

08 May

Last Friday, I presented the printable controller, the mechanical logic, in ARR 2019. I got lots of feedbacks regarding fully printable robots. People are really interested in how will we make the robots fully printable. Thanks for all of the help from my group.

08 May

Colo-AT and the simulated data generator have undergone a lot of debugging/testing over the last week. I developed testing scripts and also restructured parts of the simlulated data generator to be more re-usable. In addition, I implmented a simpleEKF (Extended Kalman Filter) localization algorithm...

30 Apr

In my last blog post, I described an approach for synchronizing the broadcast intervals of the RF modules in the network based on the system clock. In this blog post, I’d like to compare and contrast this open-loop approach with an alternative approach to synchronize the modules in lock-step. Both...

30 Apr

Consider that user is trying to build the bookshelf with the middle board as in the picture. According to current Roco implementation, the connection of the middle board H is stored in the dictionary self.connections(): {B1: F2, G3, H4, H5} According to the original implementation of Roco, the...

29 Apr

Over the past week, I've successfully transforming the range-bearing measurements to direct observation with correct statistics (without approximation) Now the algorithm is fully functional. Here is the demo setting: maximum range radius: 25 cm range uncertainty: 0.5 cm^2 bearing uncertainty...

29 Apr

I've successfully gotten the pre-generated data simulation to run correctly for robots moving in a straight line. I used the already-built animated plotting api to view the results in addition to looking at the analyzer outputs. During the debugging process, we discovered that the simpleEKF algorith...

23 Apr

As an alternative actuator for mechanical oscillator, I found SMA wire actuators. SMA wire actuator is a linear actuator that has the similar function to the SCP actuators. I decided to test the practicability of SMA actuator as an actuator of the mechanical oscillator because there are some advanta...

18 Apr

The RFM69HCW radio modules that we plan to use for CoLo PE are only capable of half-duplex communication, meaning that it can either transmit or receive packets but not both at the same time. In a typical setup, this issue would be addressed by either setting the modules to automatically retransmit...

18 Apr

Based on what happened in the experiments, we found that there may be some other definitions of snap-through other than reaching the critical switching point, depending on whether the system is under force control or displacement control. For this reason, new model of the mechanical logic system mig...