Final Assignment Week 1

The final assignment is upon us. It must be awesome.

Here's the idea. Use the two Kuka Agilus cells to create animated 3D light objects. One robot will hold a phone or iPad, playing an animation and moving it at a fixed rate to produce a frame of the animation. The other robot will hold the camera, and gradually move for every frame.

Inspiration:

3D light painting

and with a panning camera...


Movie shot: Missy - Director, Dan - Photographer, Yun - Leading Actress, Yi - Leading Utility Man

Ready, GO RoboDance!

Testing some long exposure shots stitched together as a movie.

Trying different paths and orientations of the screen relative to the camera.

sMT

The new sMT is rather buggy and crashes often. But after hours and hours of blood and sweat and frowns and tears and... you get the idea, our roboteam is programmed and simulated! 

As described above, Mitey is the panning dolly for the camera, whereas Titey holds our mobile device that will spell ROBODANCE. 

The biggest difficulty about the new sMT is that it gives inconsistent results and any click is prone to a crash. Some major crash triggers for us were

1. Selecting motion paths

(after selecting fixed paths)

(after selecting order of reference paths)

2. Choosing robot sync options

We should like to share with you some cures that helped us, of course, in no particular order. 

1. Running script by selecting "reset engine and debug" under green play button

2. Copying the Rhino file into another folder then run it anew

3. Copying the geometry into a new Rhino file and run it anew

4. On robot sync, we chose "Sync Motion," which could result in the alien abduction of one or more robot geometries, and further efforts to simulate is likely to crash the program. However, the same settings may stick when running the script again, without errors 

5. Wait for it, let it take its time

P.S. Random thought: could sMT actually stand for super Mitey Titey?

RoboPreParty

Somebody was very excited. Guess who!

Now here is the whole thing at 8x speed. Please notice Yi in the background. 

Here is the setup: 

Kuka and her new hand, dandy with a soft grip, 

an A+ team,

a stack of Solo cups,

and we're ready!

Woohoo!

We also tried something a bit more wavy and complex and discovered things that need to change for our next design.

 

Oops...

Wavy wall take 2!

 Not the best start... damn you Kuka. Glue time.

Success!

Bold.

Finally, who doesn't like bloopers?

Project003_Stacking

Kuka party. Next time we'll give Kuka a bow tie and have him pour drinks. (schedule TBD)

process: 

STEP 1// Model the tool and give it to the robot. It now has a point at the tool tip (TCP) and 3 orientation points that indicate the Origin, the Z axis, and the X axis. 

STEP 2// Teach the tool to sMT. Script script. 

STEP 3// Set up the motion paths in Rhino and make sure that path directions go from the cup source to the stack formation. Then running sMT gives us the simulation above!