This week it is a solo attempt at moving this robotic leg
What is the catch this time?
Well….I have to figure out how to move this robotic leg through a path I will plan out, but I do not have access to test multiple times on that robotic leg. This is not an unlikely scenario as in engineering development, I might have to design a program for something that is still being built.
Let’s Get started
Path Planning
The first thing we need to do is think about the motor part of it so that includes thinking about planning the path.
Why did I choose this path?
I wanted to get an idea of what kind of path a leg might do with our robotic dog, and work on smoothness, so I wanted to do a lifting swing forward.
- I estimated maximum range with measurement at a 45 degree angle being fully extended a bit over (14,-14).
- I roughly plotted a path through Desmos to obtain the necessary points for my desired path.
- Now we are going to have to run through Matlab to get inverse kinematics with angles.
MATLAB
Basically the approach to this code is using the spline tool for curves and the linespace tool for straight lines to plot points in between our chosen points. I would say that is the main gist of it.
MidtermLeg/PathTracing at 6aaa69d5376c0f0e1ede7b8f51acedbfcea1b2df · marcjm/MidtermLeg
Why do it this way??
- Helps save time we do not have to find 20 points in between two points for better motor control.
- We can take the difference between each of the hundreds of points we generated and get angle difference that we would need to move through
What are the downsides??
- Main downside is that we are going off of the automatic spline of Matlab, which likes to make a single curve at a time.
- Issue spots are harder to optimize, as when you are moving from 1 spline to another or even spline to a line, there is some weird merging that can happen.
- There probably are ways to fix this with enough optimization, but it would consume a lot of our time.
