Autonomous Aerospace Systems Lab | University of Michigan

UROP MichiganMan Project

Participants (left to right): Jeremy Green, Ryan Wolcott, Kevin Matzen
Project Affialiates and Funding/Sponsors: Catharine McGhan, Dr. Ella Atkins

Synopsis

The UROP students working in the lab over the 2007/08 academic year have focused on a hands-on manipulator arm development program designed to teach students practical skills while allowing the lab to grow its robotic system infrastructure. The students have focused primarily on the construction (physical assembly) of a grad-student-designed manipulator arm built from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) parts with only slight modifications, and then the associated software development to allow standard arm operations to occur. Students are also involved in hardware troubleshooting, open-loop testing, and a variety of experimental testing and development.

The current distribution of work is as follows:

Jeremy Green -- creation of matrix and vector math libraries useful to robot manipulation, measurement of D-H parameters of the arm, forward kinematic development (equations and code), inverse kinematic development (equations and code)

Ryan Wolcott -- baseline open-loop real-time forward kinematic control of the arm (program for debugging arm), multithreaded code development (client/server), vision processing, stereo vision calibration, object recognition

Kevin Matzen -- gumstix-robostix communications, interboard I2C, and troubleshooting; multithreaded code maintenance/expansion; planner/scheduler modification from rover to manipulator use

Catharine McGhan -- grad student supervisor

Dr. Ella Atkins -- project advisor

Publications/References

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Action Shots:

MichiganMan(ipulator)

Links + Misc

See the MichiganMan(ipulator) project for more information.
Special thanks to Gold Tip and Victory Archery for their generous donation of carbon fiber rods to the project, which make up the lightweight sturdy linkages between the joints of the arm.