received his Arduino Mega. It has two Serial ports. One of the serial ports will communicate with the computer and the other will communicate with the microproceesor. This will allow frequent position updates from the linear actuator microprocessors and buffering of commands from the computer.
received his CH Robotics IMU and uploaded the latest firmware. Unfortunately the accelerometer is returning all zeros.
reflashed the linear actuator firmware. May need to add a bigger capacitor.
Alan:
Wrote improved follow_controller but awaiting the Arduino to increase linact position accuracy before testing
Started working on the kinect portion of the modified turtlebot block manipulation demo. The actual robot state is not being displayed accurately. Debugging.
PR2Lite Arm navigation now executes on the real robot.
follow_controller.py is now arbotix independent and is already being used by another robot
more customization required to make the trajectory run smoother, especially with the linear actuators
urdf tweaks to more accurately represent PR2Lite
linear actuator driver tweaks to more accurately represent PR2Lite and avoid false collisions
to improve the performance of the linear actuators, we need to make the computer to linear actuator board communication parallel by adding more usb to serial connections
we are planning on using a CH Robotics UM6 IMU due to its existing ROS driver.