For the past week, I have been trying to add in more subcomponents to the RoCo system for the Furniture project. The shape that I have been working on is Pentagon. There are various problems that I encountered while trying to create this new component. The codes below are the python codes I wrote up...

This week we will be working on integrating the actuators with the printable robots. Thus far, we have an elementary design that shows the 10% contraction of the actuators. This actuator was made from a 20 cm precursor length and coiled under 200 RPM and a 100 gram load. The coiled length was 5 cm....

This past week we completed the coding for our paper robotic hand. We used the esp8266 microchip with Arduino to manually control turning the voltage (3.3 V) on and off through a web page. This will allow the SCP actuators to expand and contract when the voltage is off and on respectively. In turn,...

Last week I particapted the monthly research hackathon focusing on computational fabrication. We made a pop-up design of furniture module using Silhouette cutting machine. The design was inspired by pop up cards and was aimed to cut a single piece of board to form foldable furnitures such as tables...

This week the SCP actuator team succeeded in fabricating three actuators. For the first one, Pooja and Wenzhong decided to switch our precursor material from sewing thread to fishing line. With this transition, we were able to supercoil the precursor completely without it snapping; the subsequent an...

This week has been a tremendous success for the SCP Actuator team. We were finally able to successfully coil and anneal our actuators. Initially after completing the setup thoroughly and applying all of the conditions of the papers to the experimental setup, the 117/17 thread was still not coiling....

As most people know, engineers and researchers often needs to fabricate prototypes to test out their design. However, what most people don’t know is that there are many different manufacturing methods that one can take to get the product they desire. This blog post is a beginner’s guide for people...

Since last week, I have started looking into ROS(The Robot Operating System) which is a framework designed for writing robot softwares. ROS is used across various robotic platform to create a collaborative robotic software environment. Take our project as an example, there already exists built packa...

This week on the SCP Actuator team we focused on creating a more suitable setup for the coil insertion process. Last week’s insertion process resulted in uneven coils; therefore, Wenzhong and I suspected that this was due to the fact that the thread was not held in the same plane as the rotation of...

Last week I studied Loco system, which is a posibile solution to estimate the absolute position of crazyflie. The system has two parts: a Loco deck add on crazyflie and 4 Loco anchors at ground. The system as whole works as a mini GPS system and calculate crazyflie's 3D position. For the simulator I...