Monday, March 16, 2015

QUT Introduction to Robotics

I'm half-way through a 6 week online course at Queensland University of Technology with Peter Corke. The course consists of two video lectures every week, live video sessions, forum, multiple choice and Matlab tasks. There is also an optional task of building a simple, two-joint, robotic arm and programming it to perform a simple task. Here is version 1 of my Lego Mindstorms robot:


The black ball is from a Lego Star Wars series - there is another, heavier ball inside and it works as a counter-weight for the motor. The green guy is a creeper from Minecraft - purely for decoration. :-)

I don't know if I will be able to program it from Matlab, because both ways of communication with my Mac Book Air: bluetooth and USB are broken - Lego's drivers are not working.

If you wonder how Matlab programs look like, here is an example:


This code defines a cube as a series of corners and edges (indexed pairs of corners), and then draws it as seen from coordinate frame C:




UPDATE 4 June 2015:
The course has ended. I passed enough quizzes and matlab programming tasks to get a certificate of participation and my clumsy robot made it too!  Here is a mashup of the robots, mine is at 2:51: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwCVHI9YOAw