Week 2: New Tasks

Well, it's been a week. Unfortunately, for the most of this week, my technical lead was sick. However, at least, we got some stuff finished.

We have finished measuring the various parts of the apparatus components, and they are ready to be cut. I did not mark where the fixtures go because I figured that the we should mark them after we cut the various components.

Also, I've been given a side project. It's about making a visualization for a sort of ball robot (essentially simulate it in a 3D environment). For this, I'm going to use MATLAB and VRML. In a given system, there are four ball robots. These robots are tethered together with a spring (because a spring is always taut), Then, they scale the cliff together. That way, if one falls, there are three other ball robots that are sticking onto the cliff, so the fallen ball robot can jump again. This concept was inspired by mountain climbers who scale large .

Within each ball robot, there are many components. The most important features they have are thrusters. These thrusters are directly perpendicular with the ground. One might ask how does the ball robots go anywhere but up? This is explained with reaction wheels. Reaction wheels are some seriously cool stuff. Essentially, three wheels of the same mass are connected together on three different aces so that they cover all three dimensions (x,y,z or i,j,k).

3 wheels for three axes.

Then, they are to be rotated. Because of the conservation of angular momentum, the robot will spin to counter whatever the angular momentum an individual wheels build up. The last distinguishing feature is its ability to grip onto a surface. Essentially, the ball robots use a micro-spine technology that can grip onto very small aberrations in a material's surface. It is sort of like how Velcro works.