Date: November 2012
Location: Oshawa, Ontario
Company: UOIT
Team: Cameron, Andrew, Santiago

Objective:

Using a supplied inverse kinematic solver, design the path planning script to draw out the initials of your group members.

Solution:

We created the whole alphabet as a series of relational points. They were all normalized so the bottom to top was 1 unit, and left to right was 1 unit. The benefit to this is that scaling the letters becomes trivial once this is in place.

The second task was to feed the x/y/z points from the dictionary to the inverse kinematic script to get the joint angles. With the joint angles, we can then send them to the joints and see the arm draw everything out.

The script we created allowed us to choose the letter height, width, and spacing, and input a string to be drawn out.

Further Work:

We really should have had a paper-size variable to define the drawing area. That would have made maximum string length possible (after knowing width and spacing).

Also, I really wish I had built orientation into the script. Being able to write letters at an angle would have made it more robust.